Biography

Christian obtained his B.Sc. in biology from Penn State in 2013 before working toward an M.Sc. in ecology at the same institution. During that time, he studied effects of weather and climate on regional land surface phenology and caribou migration at a low-Arctic site in southwest Greenland. After completing his master’s degree, Christian worked as a UAV pilot on several forestry and archaeology projects, before going on to pursue a Ph.D. with the Post Lab at UC Davis. There, he used novel remote sensing approaches to detect fine-scale links between snow, plant growth, and bighorn sheep movement ecology in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. He received his Ph.D. in ecology at UC Davis in 2022.

Research Area

Christian combines detailed field observations with remote sensing measurements to reveal how ecological processes play out in space and time. He uses high-end computational methods to make sense of patterns that vary across scale and understand how humans drive change in patterns of biodiversity, species distributions, and ecosystem function. Christian will be examining how land use and land use change impacts nearshore nutrient dynamics and coastal coral reef communities.