When not climbing in the Alps, looking for rare plants in the desert, or searching for endangered butterflies in some remote valley, I am a biogeographer, bioarchaeologist, and lecturer in the Odyssey program at Johns Hopkins University, where I have given talks or taught seminars on the Archaeology and the Science of Pandemics; Climate Change and the Archaeology of the Americas; the Biogeography of Zoonotic Disease; the Natural History of Bats & Zoonotic Disease; the Theory of Island Biogeography; and Entropy, Information Theory, & Biodiversity.

I am the director of the Biomap-lab, where we apply bioinformatics and geospatial analysis to difficult questions concerning the biogeography, natural history, and archaeology of zoonotic diseases & their animal hosts. Our current research centers on retrospectively modeling and mapping the complex transmission pathways of the 2014-2016 Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa.

Interested in the historical biogeography and bioarchaeology of the Americas, I am presently studying the archaeobotany and the plant ecology of the deserts of Joshua Tree National Park. As part of that project, I have, for the last few years, been making my way through the massive amounts of botanical data on the Cahuilla and other First Nation Peoples, collected by John Peabody Harrington, J. Smeaton Chase, and David Prescott Barrows.

A Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, my summer biogeographic field research centers on mapping the distribution of rare Lepidoptera and the impact of climate change on their glacial and valley environments, in the Parc national des Écrins and the Parc national du Mercantour.

Other recent biogeographic research includes, a paleobotanical and archaeological study of agave, and a search for the mycotropic plants of North America.

The author or editor of more than one hundred articles and books, including the New York Times selection, MAP: Exploring the World, my latest books are Collecting for a New World and Exposing the Maya, which focus on the natural history and archaeology of the ancient Americas.

A Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, I find pondering the biological and philosophical mysteries contained in ancient DNA, wondering about the fate of Colias ponteni, and marveling at the complexity to be found in Darwin’s tangled bank, strangely comforting.