Current research

I am currently based at the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Laboratory in the Community Health Department at Christian Medical College in Vellore, India. I am conducting two research projects here that focus on the intersection between environmental conservation, public health, and epidemiology. One of them is focused on landscape correlations of coliform bacteria contamination in the rural Kaniyambadi Block, in the state of Tamil Nadu. Coliform bacteria in water come from fecal contamination, which is the prime cause of diseases such as typhoid, ghiardia (which I'm intimately familiar with myself), cholera, and a host of other diseases that are quite prevalent in the population. Water is drawn from deep water wells, some up to 200m deep and through bed rock, yet all samples tested so far have shown very high coliform levels. We are trying to determine potential contamination sources to try to address the problem. The second project is focused on forest product use in the Kaniyambadi Block. Deforestation is a serious problem in the area, yet forests provide many valuable products (such as firewood, traditional medicines, livestock grazing areas, etc) and services (water and air filtering, carbon sequestration, soil nutrient cycling, etc). We are investigating the extent to which villagers rely on forest products, and what the replacement costs are when those products are not available.

WildMetro research

I was the Research Director for WildMetro from May 2005-July 2006. Most of our research focused on determining how urbanization affects wildlife, and what steps can be taken to mitigate these almost universally negative effects. WildMetro and I received about $12,000 in grants from the National Parks Service, the Friends of the Marshlands Conservancy, Edmund Niles Huyck Preserve, and Ward Pound Ridge Reservation to study small mammals in various parts around New York. Research is still ongoing, but here are the findings from the first two years of data (summary is found here). Some of our other research included a study investigating changes in the ferns around NYC from the early 1960's until today, breeding bird surveys in various parts of NYC (particularly the Bronx), and several insect surveys of NYC natural areas.

Master's degree research

For my M.A. in Conservation Biology at Columbia I investigated the proximate reasons for natal dispersal in a population of blue monkeys in Kakamega Forest, Kenya. For those of you not in with behaviorist lingo, that means that I studied the immediate reasons why blue monkey juveniles leave the group that they are born into. Only males leave the natal group, so I compared male and female juveniles as well as males that dispersed within 3 months of my study ending to all other males. Boiled down, I spent 4 months in a rainforest watching monkeys (pictures here) and then spent many months writing about it (no pictures). My Master's advisor has the abstract of this study online, and I am working on getting it published so that you all can see a spiffy .pdf with my name on it. Update: the paper was accepted in Animal Behaviour in early November; I will post a copy of it once it actually is published, which will probably be sometime in the spring of 2007.

Other Research

For several years I worked in the New York Botanical Garden's forest -- the last old growth forest in NYC and one of the only ones in a very large area surrounding NYC -- on tree regeneration and population dynamics as well as on a survey of the forest's gray squirrel population. A few of years ago I also did a brief project investigating behavioral indicators of stress in the gelada baboons at the Bronx Zoo. In 2000 I also worked as a field assistant in Tembe Elephant Park, South Africa, on an elephant population project through the Peace Parks Foundation, though that was hardly my own research. I should mention that Tembe has a pretty spectacular web cam, as far as web cams go.