I am a Research Professor at SAFS and Co-Director of Columbia Basin Research, a UW center providing interactive real-time analysis on salmon in the Columbia Basin. My research focuses on modeling ecological and biological processes. Currently, the work divides into three general but overlapping areas: (1) migration of organisms, (2) decision processes, and (3) mortality processes.

The work is wide ranging and has both applied and basic relevance to environmental and human health. In the applied realm, for two decades we have studied and tracked in real-time the effects of hydrosystem operations on salmon in the Columbia River and are now expanding the work to track the effects of California water management on Central Valley salmon. In the basic realm, we developed and are applying new mechanistic models of survival to identify processes shaping survival patterns in human populations and the effects of senescence on degenerative and cancer-linked diseases.