I grew up outside of Detroit, but spent a lot of time on the coast of Maine as a kid. Looking at cool critters in the intertidal zone, especially at extra low tide, really awakened my interest in biology.
But then I had some great chemistry teachers in both high school and college, so, at Middlebury, I ended up majoring in chemistry and minoring in French (because that’s what “liberal arts” are all about!).
After a couple of post-graduation years ski-bumming, dog-sledding, and working in environmental policy conflict mediation in Colorado and Vermont, I returned to science and chemistry with an ecological twist at the Ecosystems Center, at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass. There, I worked as a research assistant studying how acid deposition affected trace gas fluxes from forest soils in North America and Europe. This experience launched my career in ecosystem ecology.
In grad school at Stanford, my PhD thesis focused on how changing plant diversity and composition influence nutrient cycling in serpentine grasslands. I then did a post-doc at UC Berkeley, assessing whether climate warming would turn tundra ecosystems into big sources of atmospheric CO2, further exacerbating climate warming (short answer: it looks like the answer – from our work and lots of subsequent work – is “yes”, at least in the short term).
I came to the Biology Dept. at WWU in 1998, where I teach classes from the 100 to 500-level in ecology and writing. My research continues to focus on biodiversity and element cycling – in Pacific Northwest watersheds, California grasslands, and Inner Mongolia, China – all with the goal of working towards a more sustainable society.
If you might be interested in working in my lab, either as an undergrad or grad student, please see the info for Prospective Students, in the People tab, above.