Professor, School of Human Evolution & Social Change
Professor, School of Complex Adaptive Systems
Affiliate Professor, School of Earth and Space Exploration
Arizona State University

I am a computational archaeologist and Professor of Anthropology at San Diego State University, where I direct the Computational Archaeology Laboratory. My research integrates geospatial analysis, agent-based and simulation modeling, and complex adaptive systems theory to investigate long-term human–environment interactions, with particular attention to socio-environmental change associated with early farming and herding in Mediterranean and other semi-arid landscapes. I have conducted field and modeling research in regions including Italy, Jordan, and Central Asia, and my work spans landscape archaeology, land-use dynamics, and environmental modeling. I have been a member of the CoMSES community for well over a decade and have contributed multiple models to the Computational Model Library, several of which have undergone formal peer review. In addition to research, I regularly teach with agent-based models at undergraduate and graduate levels and use CoMSES models as both research and pedagogical resources. I am committed to open, reproducible, and theoretically informed computational modeling and to strengthening the role of peer-reviewed models as durable scholarly contributions.

I am an environmental archaeologist, specializing in charcoal analysis, computational and analytical proxy modeling, and quantitative methods to understand the dynamic relationship between fire, humans, and long-term environmental change. I work primarily in the Western United States and the Western Mediterranean. I am passionate about our public lands and ensuring that everyone has access and opportunity to experience them.