Jonathan Cummings Email and Phone Number

I built my first Stella model in college, and watched it predict the amount of thermal mass needed to regulate the temperature in the college's planned solar greenhouse. I've been using data science and decision analysis to improve decision making ever since.I also want to tell you about a way of thinking and the problems this thinking helps to address.Everyday each of us makes about 3000 decisions. Many of these decisions are largely inconsequential, however from time to time our decisions can impact the course of our own or others’ lives. Imagine if there was a practical, common sense process for making important decisions with transparent, well-reasoned results. Now imagine if the world used this process and applied it to their personal decisions, work lives, and as a society to addressing our ecological challenges.The process for making better decisions is called Structured Decision Making (SDM). While you might think this will be a complex process, the beauty of SDM is that it is an adaptable, common sense method that can be tailored to a problem of any size or complexity.Using SDM I've helped to address problems that range from what car I should purchase, where I should live with my roommates and where my grandparents would like to spend their retirement to environmental decisions that include sea-level rise adaptation strategies in San Francisco Bay salt marshes, national cormorant management plans, adaptive management of New England cottontails, management of Atlantic Salmon hatcheries, and improved quota allocation for Fraser River sockeye salmon. I am always seeking new opportunities where I can fulfill my personal mission of providing decision support that enables decision makers to best understand their desires, the actions available to them, and which of those actions will best achieve their desires.Specialties: Natural resource management, model selection, quantitative ecology, structured decision making, decision analysis, R