About Erin's Work
Erin is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation Science at the University of Queensland, Australia. She is a conservation biologist interested in using the best available ecological, social, and economic information to improve the way conservation efforts are planned and implemented. Her current projects include a national prioritization of conservation actions to conserve threatened species on Australian islands, and an assessment of the impacts of introduced birds on native biodiversity and the economy.
Erin completed her Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California-Santa Cruz in 2015, where her dissertation research focused on quantifying the impacts of invasive alien mammals on globally threatened insular vertebrate species, and on the development of optimization tools to prioritize invasive mammal eradications on islands. She also investigated national-level relationships between conservation costs, governance, and human rights to better understand how prioritizing conservation based on management costs alone may lead to lower success rates for conservation projects as well as unintended negative outcomes for local people.
Prior to beginning her Ph.D. research, Erin worked in the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, NY, where she contributed to conservation-related research projects, museum exhibits, and education initiatives. Erin has conducted fieldwork in the eastern and western continental US, Hawaii, Alaska, and Costa Rica. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Yale University in 2004.