The collecting institution sector has always been fascinating to me, and I feel fortunate to be a part it. A thread through my various activities is finding solutions to the exploration of knowledge.
Culture.
Much of my professional life has been devoted to exploring how museums and other cultural institutions can bring knowledge to life. Working across several countries and a wide variety of organizations has provided opportunities to connect scholarship, collections, creativity, and public engagement, and to consider how these connections can enrich the experiences of visitors and communities.
This work has encompassed institutional leadership, strategic planning, scientific research, exhibition development, and the care of significant cultural and natural heritage collections. One recurring interest has been the possibilities that arise when traditional institutional boundaries become more flexible, allowing science, history, art, and contemporary ideas to inform one another.
Exhibitions have been an especially rewarding part of this journey. Projects exploring extinction, the Anthropocene, and the history of scientific discovery have brought together research, storytelling, and design to make complex ideas accessible and engaging. Equally satisfying has been the collaborative work of developing collections, public programs, and institutional identities that reflect the changing interests and needs of the communities they serve.
International collaboration has provided another valuable perspective. Through leadership roles in the International Council of Museums and its specialist committees, I’ve had the opportunity to work with colleagues from around the world on questions of museum ethics, professional practice, and the evolving responsibilities of collecting institutions.
Throughout these experiences, I’ve come to appreciate how much cultural institutions can achieve when scholarly expertise, imagination, and a shared sense of purpose come together. Helping to create the conditions in which those qualities can flourish remains one of the most rewarding aspects of my work.
Knowledge.
Writing has been consistently important through my career. For all the different kinds of writing I do, exhibition labels, articles, my blog, and books, including The Future of Natural History Museums (Routledge, 2018), it’s popular science that brings me the most joy, and is something I return to frequently. This is the place that enables me to translate the scientific principles I have spent years grappling with into something creative that a non-scientific reader can feel as well as understand. My most recent publication is as co-author of the beautiful The Linda Hall: A Visual History (Linda Hall Press, 2026).
Recently I started The Attentive Naturalist on Substack, which is a place for longer essays that look more closely at both the natural world and the human one, often through the same lens. I write about ecology, animal behavior, Egyptian animal mummies, dioramas, the history of science, and whatever else seems to form connective tissue between the natural world and the social one.
Nature.
From a scientific perspective, an idea that has occupied me longest is how ecological patterns that make sense at one level, a single bird’s foraging choice, a stand of trees, a wetland’s water chemistry, can produce entirely different outcomes at the level of a landscape or a region. My research on waterbirds in human-dominated environments, sustained on and off for twenty years across institutions and coastlines, has traced this question through reef systems increasingly shaped by development and tourism. Some of my scholarly papers have made it to Research Gate.
Involving the public in conservation science is, for me, especially meaningful. Aside from collecting robust data, these initiatives embed natural heritage more deeply in our culture through first-hand experiences. I have been fortunate to be able to create community science opportunities with some of my work. These include guiding the foundation of the Birds in Backyards project in Sydney, Australia, as well as New Zealand’s Kererū Discovery Project.0
