Path
My story
I’m a native of Texas. I learned to hunt there and spent years pursuing northern bobwhites — until I realized they had been extirpated from central Texas by the 1990s. That loss stayed with me.
A Texas Parks & Wildlife wildlife youth camp in Kerrville was instrumental in pulling me into the field. I got into Notre Dame when there wasn’t a wildlife program yet, so I took the long way in: the Great Books curriculum through the Program of Liberal Studies, with a dual major in Spanish (I still speak Spanish).
From there I worked in public relations — including the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Attorney’s Office — learning how to translate complex work for people who need clarity. That same instinct led me into wildlife and rangeland science at UC Berkeley (M.S. in range, Ph.D. in wildlife and rangeland), then Extension at Berkeley, and later Wildlife Management Specialist with University of Maryland Extension (2020–2026), where applied research and teaching met landowners and managers on the ground.
After earning tenure, I moved to the private side with Land & Wildlife — not to leave the mission, but to have an even bigger impact on habitat, and to grow a business that can dedicate its resources to land conservation. My goal is to help improve management on over a million acres, and to purchase and conserve land for wildlife.
I believe nature is a pathway for understanding deeper aspects of our reality and ourselves — a way to calm and relieve our nervous systems of the bustle of life, to connect with others, and to feel the chorus of the natural world deeply.
My recent focus on acoustics is a bet: we can now digitize signals from nature to drive decision-making for habitat on the ground. I’ll still work in habitat management and education — reach out if you’d like to collaborate there — but this focus lets us do that work with greater understanding, and to share knowledge in ways that weren’t possible before.