I'm a conservation biologist interested in how animals respond to environmental change. I'm something of a details person and like to find out about the processes operating in animal populations and how they respond to environmental changes caused by things like disturbance, habitat fragmentation or logging. I do a lot of field-based research, but often resort to genetic methods to study the things that animals don't tell us in other ways.
A current research focus of mine is the interaction between environmental disturbance, population dynamics and genetic diversity. We know that disturbance is a key driver of population and community dynamics globally, but its effects on biodiversity at the genetic level are largely unappreciated. I also do research on methods for understanding population processes like dispersal from spatial genetic data. My projects are focused on tall eucalypt forests in the Victorian central highlands as well as NSW coastal heathland. Before moving to ANU I did a post-doc at Macquarie University on marine invertebrate population genetics, investigating links between ocean current circulation and population connectivity.