Who am I? How did I get here?
Biography
I grew up in Valparaiso, Indiana, a mid-sized town an hour east of Chicago and 15 minutes south of Lake Michigan. My interest in ecology and the environment began developing when I was 16 due to two sources. The first was an increasing consciousness about politics and world affairs. While going through my read-tons-of-Noam Chomsky-and-Howard Zinn phase as a junior in high school, I also got interested in environmental politics and environmental justice. The second source of my new found interest in the environment came from an AP Environmental Systems course I took as a senior in high school. This course gave me exposure to the scientific side of environment science, and I've been hooked ever since.
Like my brother and sister, I went to college at Purdue University, where I majored in an interdisciplinary environmental science program. I took my first GIS course in Spring of 2001, and managed to apply GIS to nearly every course I took the following semester (Field Ecology, Wetlands Ecology, Remote Sensing..and I even worked it into a Technical Writing course somehow!).
I was fortunate to land a job as a GIS technician for Purdue's Ag & Bio Engineering Department in January 2002, where I was able to learn the fine art of data management, troubleshooting the million-and-one things that could go wrong with ArcView, the joys of batch processing and cartography. Since most environmental folks at Purdue did not know much GIS, I quickly became 'the guy who does GIS.' One thing lead to another, and upon Dr. Kerry Rabenold's encouragement, I found myself as a Master's student in the Biology Department, researching the use of GIS and statistical modeling to map the distributions of birds in the mountains of Costa Rica. While I was able to go to a Costa Rica for a month, most of my research time was spent running models for 10+ hours every day, and reading modeling papers the remaining time.
For the past two years, I've been living in Flagstaff and working on wildlife corridors with Dr. Paul Beier at Northern Arizona University. Until the end of June 2007, I will be finishing up programming and technical writing for the CorridorDesigner project. Who knows where life will take me after this!