I am an Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. I study and teach topics related to quantitative methods and spatial statistics, especially as they relate to government censuses and surveys. 

My research is at the intersection of statistics, mapping and population geography. My research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the US Census Bureau. Currently, my work is funded by the Sloan Foundation to analyze the effect of differential privacy on the use of Decennial Census data and by the US Forest Service to develop methods for estimating small area forest characteristics. My students are well-funded on their own right, currently they are funded by the Tennessee Valley Authority to study pre-historic climate in the Tennessee Valley and by Oak Ridge National Laboratory to study remote-sensing based population analysis.

I have previously serve as an advisor to the US Census Bureau through the National Academy of Sciences, where I am the lead on Operational Geography Subcommittee on the Standing Committee on Reengineering Census Operations.

In my free time, I most enjoy playing the cello and spending time backpacking or discovering engineering with my daughters.

Why I study geography and data science (and why you should too)

I have always been curious about the world. Peoples. Plants. Places. All of it. Geography satisfies that curiosity because geographers study just about everything.  Geography is the original interdisciplinary science.  

As an expert in data science and quantitative methods, all kinds of great peope doing great science come to you and ask for help and collaboration. You get to feed that curiosity. Every day is a new puzzle to solve.