Welcome!
Welcome to my website. I hope you will find it entertaining and in some way useful. Below is a short bio to provide some context as to who I am.
I left a small Ontario town and family business in tourism to pursue a Bachelor's and Master's in Geography at the University of Waterloo. The discipline of Geography describes objects and the relationships among them in space, and how the attributes of those objects and the relationships among them change over space and time. The broad scope of Geography was appealing for my Bachelor's because it provided a conduit for my interdisciplinary desires, which included: an economics minor, information technologies specialization (Geographical Information Systems and Remote Sensing), and courses in mathematics and computer science. Following my Bachelor's, my Master's research focused on land use science in which I evaluated the effects of household structure changes and ageing on deforestation trends along the Trans-Amazon highway using agent-based simulation modeling. Now I am nearing the end of my Ph.D. at the School of Natural Resources & Environment at the University of Michigan. My Ph.D. research has been interdisciplinary in that it incorporates many of the disciplines from which I have taken course work. Perhaps it is best described as an excercise in synthesis and integration as I have tried to integrate many tools (e.g. agent-based models, geographical information systems, ecosystem process models, and empirical data collection techniques) to answer land use and land cover change (LUCC) problems and evaluate the effects of land-use development policies on LUCC. Its been a long and exciting travel through the academe... one that will provide me with a slightly different role as I become faculty in the near future.
Cheers.