I am a Lead Scientist for The Nature Conservancy, the world’s largest environmental organization. I’ve been working to develop guidance to help balance energy and infrastructure demands with environmental conservation. I’ve also been at the forefront of moving development and mitigation planning to a landscape scale. I’ve pioneered the Conservancy’s Development by Design approach, an initiative that seeks to improve development planning through the incorporation of predictive modeling to provide solutions that benefits conservation goals and development objectives and I direct its implementation in over a dozen countries around the world. To date the program has helped shape changes to national level environmental licensing policy in the USA, Mongolia and Colombia; helped to guide the implementation of approximately a billion dollars in offset and other conservation funding in the USA; and help guide the establishment of ~150,000 km2 of new protected areas in Mongolia. My past work has focused primarily on the conservation and ecology of freshwater systems. In particular, I’ve been interested in the global amphibian decline phenomenon. This line of research has involved investigating how perturbations resulting from climate change and land use changes can stress organisms, making them more susceptible to disease. I’ve published over 130 articles, on topics ranging from climate change to the effectiveness of conservation strategies; examples of my work have been published in Nature, Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Conservation Biology, Ecology and American Scientist. Prior to joining The Nature Conservancy I was a professor at Penn State University and I’ve also held faculty appointments at Yale University and the University of Wyoming. When I grow up I want to be a photographer!