I am a resilience ecologist, postdoctoral research associate and adjunct professor based within the Center for Resilience in Agricultural Working Landscapes (CRAWL). I study resilience as an emergent phenomenon, with a focus on scaling (e.g., adaptive cycles, panarchy and the discontinuity hypothesis), mechanisms of resilience (e.g., the cross-scale resilience model) and regime shifts. I am also interested in how these theories apply across non-ecological complex adaptive systems and have used them on economic and human population systems. 

My current work is focused on agroecosystems. I am a co-PI and project manager for an NSF grant to create a Research Coordination Network. Our network is NIARR (Network for Integrated Agricultural Resilience Research). NIARR is exciting because we are bringing together four research networks as well as other agriculture scientists from across North America to apply resilience science to agricultural working landscapes. This cross-network collaboration enables us to develop broad, multi-scale research questions such as the vulnerability of ag landscapes to regime shifts. For example, climate and land use change are influencing the vulnerability of our agriculture landscapes to shifts like we saw during the Dust Bowl event of the 1930s, but our ability to anticipate the probability of such shifts is poor. Food security is dependent on reliable agricultural production, so questions like these have a great deal of significance for society.