1. What do you study related to biodiversity (what are your research questions, what organisms do you work on)?
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 I study how humans interact with their environments, and specifically how complex human societies recondition their surroundings by altering the structural and biological compositions of the landscape. My work focuses on understanding the complex interaction between the human past and environmental biodiversity through time.
I am especially interested in how socio-political developments in human societies over the past 2,000 years have contributed to the biological diversity we see in the world today. My research strives to understand biodiversity, not as a static phenomenon represented only in the present, but as a product of a long interaction between human societies and their environments.
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2. How do you study biodiversity (for example, what technological tools and methodologies do you use in your research)?
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I study landscapes as dynamic entities and model interactions across landscapes using advanced satellite imaging technologies, computer models built on geographic information systems, and archaeogeophysical prospection techniques like ground penetrating radar, magnetometry, and electrical resistivity.
I also collaborate with paleoethnobotanists and geologists to study the remnants of biodiversity in centuries past. We use computer models and plant and animal remains dated from archaeological sites and landscapes to reconstruct the biotic makeup of a place centuries or millennia ago, and how that biodiversity changed over time.
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3. Where do you study biodiversity?
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My primary research area is in the South-Central Andes, bounded by the highest navigable lake in the world (Lake Titicaca), the worlds driest desert (the Atacama), and the Pacific Ocean.
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4. How might your research have implications for biological conservation?
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 My research contributes a long-term perspective on the nature of human impacts on biodiversity. It helps us define how the current landscape and biota distribution were formed by millennia of human/environment interaction. If we do not know the processes by which current biological populations have integrated with their landscapes and the other species on those landscapes, including humans, we cannot pretend to understand how long term processes of sustainability and conservation will operate.
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5. How did you become interested in science? What made you want to be a scientist, and how did you get to The Field Museum?
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I was raised in rural Wisconsin where I was fascinated with the formation of coastal landscapes along Lake Michigan, and how people managed and sculpted those landscapes. Plus, visits to The Field Museum as a boy engendered an interest in the relationship between people, plants, animals, and their environments. Thus, when I attended college at Northwestern University I gravitated towards geography and anthropology and began research in Peru.
I took my Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of Florida, where I minored in GIS & Remote Sensing, then taught at Florida and at Boston University. When I had the opportunity to join The Field Museum faculty in 2001, I jumped at the chance to return to Chicago and to work at the institution that originally awoke the scientist in me.
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