The Executive Board
OFFICERS
Sarah Grimké Aucoin, (Chair), NYC Parks & Recreation (sarah.aucoin@parks.nyc.gov)
Sarah Grimke Aucoin currently serves as the Chief of Education & Wildlife for NYC Parks. Sarah’s tenure in NYC Parks spans seventeen years of innovation and programmatic expansion in the areas of environmental education, outdoor adventure, active conservation and wildlife management. As Deputy Director and then Director of the Urban Park Rangers, Sarah’s efforts took a broad focus, but she devoted much of her expertise and effort to the preservation of the endangered piping plover in Rockaway Park, the management of the bald eagle reintroduction initiative in Inwood Hill Park, the development of public climate change education with Columbia University, and the installation of the Alley Pond Adventure Course, the largest publicly managed ropes course in the northeast. As Chief of Education & Wildlife, Sarah oversees the Urban Park Rangers, Teaching & Learning Support, and the Wildlife Unit, whose mission is to promote coexistence between people and urban wildlife. As an informed resource for citizens and policymakers, the Wildlife Unit serves as an ambassador for New York City's diverse wildlife communities and seeks to create a future where wildlife is a familiar, understood, and indispensable part of New York City's urban landscape. Sarah has a rich and accomplished academic background that includes a Bachelor of Arts degree in Biology from the University of California – Santa Cruz, and a Master of Science degree in Ecology from the University of Louisiana. She is an accomplished writer and researcher, having written and published a number of peer-reviewed monographs on subjects ranging from the breeding patterns of tadpoles to sexual bias in studies of animal behavior. Sarah has been a member of the The Wildlife Society and the Urban Wildlife Working Group since 2015, and a board member of the Urban Wildlife Working Group since 2018.
Jason Luscier, (Chair-Elect), Le Moyne College (lusciejd@lemoyne.edu)
Jason Luscier is an Associate Professor of Biological & Environmental Sciences at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, NY. His research program at Le Moyne is centered on evaluating effects from anthropogenic activities on urban wildlife in both Syracuse, NY and Cork City, Ireland. He has developed a smartphone app called CatTracker for gathering community science data on distributions of free-roaming domestic cats. Other research includes the evaluation of urbanization on bird populations and communities, effects of artificial light at night and noise pollution on urban amphibians and bats, and urban deer disease ecology. All of his research projects incorporate undergraduate environmental science majors. Jason has been a member of The Wildlife Society since 2000 and serves on the DEI Networking group.
Jessica Alderson, (Treasurer-Secretary), Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, (Jessica.Alderson@tpwd.texas.gov)
Jessica Alderson received her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences from Texas A&M University. Her Master’s research focus was on the human dimensions of urban wildlife management, specifically white-tailed deer. In 2008, Jessica began working as an Urban Biologist for Texas Parks and Wildlife in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. In 2012 she transferred to the Urban Office in San Antonio. As an Urban Biologist, Jessica performed professional planning, management, research, conflict resolution and public outreach associated with wildlife, habitat and natural resource management in urban areas. In 2023, Jessica became the Urban Wildlife Technical Guidance Program Leader, which supervises the TPWD urban biologists across the state.
Maureen H. Murray (Past Chair), Lincoln Park Zoo (maureenmurray@lpzoo.org)
Maureen Murray is the Wildlife Disease Ecologist at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago and is interested in the consequences of urbanization on wildlife health, behavior, and interactions with humans. She recently studied the effects of urban land use and human feeding on the transmission of Salmonella and host condition in the American white ibis at the University of Georgia. Prior to her postdoc on urban ibises she completed her PhD on individual variation in urban coyote ecology and consequences for human-coyote conflict at the University of Alberta. Maureen’s goal is to improve wildlife conservation and management by better understanding how wildlife live among people and urban development. Maureen has been a member of The Wildlife Society since 2012 and a board member of the Urban Wildlife Working Group since 2015.
MEMBERS
Travis Gallo (TWS Conference Coordinator), University of Maryland, (tgallo@umd.edu)
Travis Gallo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Technology at the University of Maryland. Travis’s research team focuses on understanding how urban environments shape species distributions, populations, communities, and behaviors with a central focus on species conservation and equitable and safe access to nature. The goal of his research team is to provide evidence-based solutions that simultaneously conserve biological diversity and improve the lives of urban residents. Current projects in Travis’s lab are a large-scale camera trap project in the Washington, D.C. region (collaboration with the Urban Wildlife Information Network - UWIN), a deer-human interaction project with an eye towards zoonotic disease transmission, assessing conservation incentive programs in Tanzania, and various D.C. specific projects. Prior to working in the D.C. region, Travis was a postdoctoral researcher at the Urban Wildlife Institute at the Lincoln Park Zoo where he worked on a variety of research questions associated with the Chicago UWIN site. Travis is an Associate Editor for Urban Ecosystems and has been a member of the Urban Wildlife Working Group since 2016. Travis was also the local co-host for the 2023 International Urban Wildlife Conference in Washington, D.C.
Leslie Bliss-Ketchum, (Registrar), Samara Group LLC (leslie@samarapdx.com)
Leslie Bliss-Ketchum is a wildlife ecologist who has been actively monitoring and researching the impacts of the built environment on habitat connectivity, assessing the success of mitigation efforts and developing habitat connectivity assessments as well as developing flexible and functional urban biodiversity monitoring frameworks. She is currently serving as registrar with the Urban Wildlife Working Group as Secretary Treasurer, after serving as a board member. She is a Past-President of the Oregon Chapter of The Wildlife Society and former Conservation Affairs Representative for the Northwest Section of TWS. Leslie is the owner and director of an environmental consulting firm, Samara Group that was founded to enhance environmental projects centered on rigorous science, inclusive partnerships, and effective communications. Leslie received her Ph.D. in Environmental Science from Portland State University where her research focused primarily on the mechanisms that contribute to roads becoming barriers to wildlife movement and measuring wildlife response to mitigation efforts. She is excited to be continuing this work on a variety of scales, from region to neighborhood, to statewide and beyond. She received her Bachelor of Science in Environmental Science with a minor in Biology and graduated Cum Laude from PSU and is an adjunct faculty member at Portland State University teaching courses in field methods in wildlife science, urban ecology and road ecology.
Morgan Farmer, (Student Presentation Coordinator), University of Wisconsin - Madison (mjmorales@wisc.edu)
Morgan is currently a PhD student in the Wildlife Ecology department at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. She first started studying coyotes during her undergraduate at the University of California - Berkeley where she competed an independent senior thesis looking at how habitat use of urban coyotes was affected by habitat characteristics and recreation. After completing her undergraduate education, she moved to Wisconsin to complete a Master’s degree where her research focused on competition and island biogeography as drivers of spatiotemporal activity and the effects of human activity and structures on the carnivore community of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore. Her current research focuses on urban canids and their interactions with each other, their environment, and with humans.
Lauren Stanton, (IUWC Sponsorship Coordinator), University of California, Berkeley, (lastanton@berkeley.edu)
Lauren Stanton is an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley. She is interested in how humans and urban environmental conditions shape wildlife behavior via cognitive and physiological mechanisms. Lauren uses cutting-edge technologies and creative methodologies to study urban mesocarnivores in the field, with a primary focus on raccoons. Her PhD research at the University of Wyoming highlighted both inter- and intraspecific variation in mesocarnivore behavior, links between emotional reactivity and cognition in raccoons, and new insights on raccoon social dynamics. Now, her postdoctoral research with Dr. Chris Schell is focused on understanding how humans and heterogeneity in urban environmental conditions arising from societal inequity yield variation in wildlife behavior and welfare. She recently investigated how anthropogenic subsidies alters risk-taking and problem-solving abilities in captive coyotes via the gut-brain axis. Using knowledge gained from this captive work, she is now deploying the same problem-solving task across diverse neighborhoods in the East Bay to evaluate whether mesocarnivore response to novelty and cognitive performance could be driven by differences in (urban) environmental conditions. Lauren works closely with residents and community organizations, and uses her research to promote coexistence with urban wildlife.
Jennifer Mullinax (Promotion Coordinator), University of Maryland, (wildlife@umd.edu)
Jennifer Mullinax is an associate professor of wildlife ecology and management at the University of Maryland (Go Terps!). She is a wildlife biologist by training, specializing in black bears, North American elk, and white-tailed deer. Her research lab, the Applied Spatial Wildlife Ecology Lab, studies the ecology of wildlife with emphasis on habitat use, animal movements, and landscape epidemiological modeling. She has done extensive urban deer work and is interested in furthering the One Health framework needed to address Lyme disease in those areas as well as Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza throughout the US. She also has a lab focus on structured decision making and wildlife conflict resolution in Maryland, D.C., and South Africa. In addition to her active research programs, Jennifer does extensive teaching and curriculum development, including completely restructuring the Wildlife Ecology and Management curriculum, including all class requirements and five individual classes, including Urban Wildlife Ecology. Jennifer holds a Bachelor’s degree from Clemson University (Go Tigers!) in Wildlife Biology and a Master’s in Wildlife Ecology and a PhD in Natural resources both from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (Go VOLS!). Jennifer has been an active member of TWS since 1997 and is a Certified Wildlife Biologist®. She is the current President-Elect of the Maryland-Delaware Chapter of The Wildlife Society and lives in Greenbelt, MD with her husband, Gabe, and two crazy offspring, Mabel and Silas.
Kaylee Byers (Election Committee Coordinator), British Columbia Canadian Wildlife Health Cooperative (kaylee_byers@sfu.ca)
Dr. Kaylee Byers (she/her) is the Deputy Director for the British Columbia node of the Canadian Wildlife Health Cooperative and a Research Associate at Simon Fraser University. Her research explores ways to support healthy urban wildlife populations and is focused on improving communications about wildlife-associated health risks. Kaylee is also active in Science Communication and works to create spaces for scientists to share their research more broadly. She co-creates and hosts the podcast Nerdin' About which can be found here, https://nerdinabout.podbean.com/
Student Representative
Tali Caspi, University of California, Davis, (tcaspi@ucdavis.edu)
Tali is currently a PhD candidate in the Ecology Graduate Group at the University of California, Davis. Tali's research focuses on emerging patterns and underlying mechanisms of individual variation across the urban landscape. Her current work investigates variation in the diet and physiology of urban coyotes in San Francisco. Prior to her graduate studies, Tali worked as a wildlife educator at the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, which led her to think critically about the ecology of cities, human-wildlife interactions, and who has access to nature. Accordingly, she is interested in research that serves as a meaningful bridge among academia, government agencies, and the community and is committed to science outreach in cities that fosters connections between urban communities and nature. Tali has been a member of the Urban Wildlife Working Group since 2019 and has participated in the International Urban Wildlife Conference in 2021 and 2023.