LinkedIn/ CV / Bio
I am a bird-friendly building policy researcher and advocate working at the intersection of bird conservation and sustainable planning. I investigate what it means to plan cities for birds and other more-than-humans, exploring the question of how birds become recognized as legitimate political subjects in planning systems and how that recognition transforms debates about development, land use, and sustainability.
Through my advocacy, I promote policies to make built spaces safer for birds, such as bird-friendly building standards, Dark Sky lighting practices, native landscaping, and alternatives to rodenticides. I co-founded and co-chaired Lights Out Connecticut and helped to lead a successful statewide campaign to pass Connecticut’s Lights Out Law (Public Act 23-143), which requires state agencies to turn off all unneccessary lights by 11pm—for birds! From 2024-26, I chaired Lights Out Central New York, a nonprofit project of the Onondaga Audubon Society dedicated to making the night sky darker and safer for migrating birds.
From 2022-2023, I served as the policy researcher for the award-winning Yale Bird-friendly Building Initiative, a collaborative project of Yale Law School and American Bird Conservancy. In that role, I co-authored Building Safer Cities for Birds: How Cities Are Leading the Way on Bird-Friendly Building Policy, the first comparative report analyzing bird-friendly building laws.
My PhD research at SUNY ESF focuses on bird-friendly building policymaking in the U.S. and Canada. I combine policy theory and environmental ethics to explain why some U.S. and Canadian citiees have bird-friendly building policies, while others don't. I'm particularly interested in what happens when birds move from being objects of conservation to policy beneficiaries with specific claims on the design of the built environment.
Collaboring with the SUNY ESF Office of Sustainability, I helped to secure ESF's mandatory bird-friendly building policy as part of our 2025 Sustainability Action Plan. I also led a community-based retrofit pilot project that mitigated several large glass windscreens on our Syracuse campus, to reduce bird building collisions, and helped create an iNaturalist SUNY ESF Community Bird Collision Project to track collisions. In 2021, I led a successful campaign to convince Yale Divinity School to join the National Audubon Society's Lights Out program for migrating birds. Both Yale University and SUNY have recognized my bird conservation advocacy with awards in sustainability and public service.
I hold an MDiv from Yale Divinity School and an M.A. in history from the University of Chicago.
I welcome all collaborative opportunities to help pass bird-friendly policies in municipalities, states, and universities.
