As Director of Conservation and Bird Program Lead for the Sam Shine Foundation, I write site conservation plans and help manage Foundation owned properties across the Eastern United States. I partner with other conservation organizations to help provide funding for excellent conservation projects. In addition to our general conservation work, I also am responsible for leading a bird conservation program which seeks to identify bird species that are declining and in need of conservation action. I then work with partner organizations to help focus new conservation initiatives to help these target species thrive.

As Director of Conservation, I supervised several teams of staff including our Science, Freshwater, Land Protection and Land Management teams which included 35 people. I was responsible for developing our overall conservation strategy and approach, writing and leading our strategic plan and reporting to our board, and overseeing more than 20 individual budgets totaling several million dollars annually.

As Ecoregion Director, I was responsible for managing two project offices for The Nature Conservancy. This included the Tippecanoe River Project in Winamac, Indiana as well as the Western Lake Erie Basin Project in Angola, Indiana. We worked with the agriculture industry to help reduce the amount of nutrient runoff from fields and improve water quality in the Wabash River, the Tippecanoe River, and in streams across NW Indiana, SE Michigan, and NW Ohio.

From 1998-2001 I was a land steward for The Nature Conservancy in Texas. I worked on several endangered bird projects. This included habitat mapping and mist netting Golden-cheeked Warblers on the Fort Hood military base in central Texas as well as managing a 2300 acre coastal prairie preserve near Galveston Texas where we had one of the last two locations of Attwater's Prairie-Chicken at the time. Finally, from 2001-2007 I was a land steward for The Nature Conservancy in northern Indiana. As part of these roles I became a prescribed burn boss and led prescribed fires on TNC property, controlled invasive species, and worked closely with many partners including the USFWS, SeaWorld, the Houston Zoo, National Geographic, the US Department of Defense, and many state agencies.