When not climbing in the Alps, looking for rare plants in the desert, or searching for endangered butterflies in some remote valley, I am the director and founder of the λ-LAB (Lambda-Lab), where we apply high-performance computing and geospatial analysis to difficult questions concerning the biogeography, bioarchaeology, and natural history of zoonotic diseases & their animal hosts.

Formerly the Curator of the Kislak Collection of the Archaeology of the Early Americas at the Library of Congress, I am interested in the links between the bioarchaeology, biogeography, and ethnobiology of Native cultures in the Americas. Currently, my research centers on tracing the locations of the specimens of Lepidoptera that make up the monumental Biologia Centrali-Americana.

Presently, I am also working on a long term project called Becoming Levi-Strauss, which centers on repeating his reading of all of the volumes of the Annual Reports of the Bureau of American Ethnology and tracing their influence on his Structures élémentaires de la parenté & Tristes Tropiques.

A lecturer at the Johns Hopkins University, I have given talks about or taught seminars on Evolutionary Game Theory; the Biogeography of Zoonotic Disease; the Natural History of Bats & Zoonotic Disease; the Theory of Island Biogeography; GIS for Biogeographic Applications; the Science & Archaeology of Pandemics; and Entropy, Information Theory, & Biodiversity.

The author of more than one hundred articles and books, including the New York Times bestseller, MAP: Exploring the World, my work has been featured in many media outlets including the New York Times, Washington Post, the BBC, CBS News, Bloomberg News, and NPR’s All Things Considered.

My recent books include, Collecting for a New World, which traces the provenance of the archaeological collections of the Library of Congress, and (with Katia Sainson), Exposing the Maya: Early Archaeological Photography in the Americas.

A Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, I find pondering the biological and philosophical mysteries contained in ancient DNA, wondering about the gyroid photonic structure of a butterfly's wing, and marveling at the complexity to be found in Darwin’s tangled bank, strangely comforting.