I'm an assistant professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Forestry and Department of Geography at Michigan State University. My general research interests lie in the fields of natural resource inventory, Bayesian statistics, spatial statistics, and statistical computing. In terms of application areas, my research focuses on spatio-temporal modeling of important economic and ecological forest attributes, indices of biodiversity, and ecological systems. A central theme in my research is the use of hierarchical models to integrate information from disparate sources to improve inference and predictions.

I received my Ph.D. in Natural Resources Science and Management from the Department of Forest Resources at the University of Minnesota in January, 2007. Also that spring, I finished my M.S. in Statistics at the School of Statistics. My degree work focused on developing multi-source forest inventory strategies; forest resource mapping, assessment, and management; modeling forest inventory data with complex dependence structures;  and developing open source statistical and geospatial analysis software (e.g. spBayes and MBA).