I'm currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Earth System Science group at the Center for Advanced Systems Understanding (CASUS), in Görlitz, Germany.
My research examines how animals move through landscapes and what happens when they encounter human infrastructure. Roads are a clear example: they constrain where animals can go, fragment the connectivity between habitats, and often turn routine movements into fatal ones. I work at the intersection of movement ecology and road ecology, characterizing the drivers of wildlife-vehicle collisions as to anticipate and mitigate them.
Robust movement research begins long before any animal is tracked, in the design of the study itself. That principle led me to develop movedesign, a Shiny application and R package that helps researchers plan tracking studies by simulating how sampling decisions, tracking duration, fix frequency, and the number of individuals, propagate into the reliability of movement metrics such as home range estimates. The rationale is straightforward: quantify what a given dataset can support before collecting it, so that field effort translates into defensible inferences!
This focus grew out of years in the field, across two continents and a range of study systems. It began in the Amazon rainforest, in Brazil, where during master's work I examined bat communities across the vertical strata of the canopy and tested how forest fragmentation reshapes their use of that space. Thailand came next: first radio-tracking venomous snakes, then a PhD resolving the spatiotemporal patterns of wildlife-vehicle collisions across a biodiversity hotspot.
I am committed to public engagement, and have participated in numerous outreach events that make movement ecology research accessible and exciting for audiences of all ages, from schoolchildren to adults. I have also taught movement ecology workshops in Thailand, Germany, Singapore, Australia, Portugal, Costa Rica, and (soon!) Kenya.
If you're looking for a collaborator, advice, or assistance on any movement or road ecology topic, please reach out. I'd be happy to help!