Justin Brown, M.S.
Justin is originally from California and has worked on a variety of carnivore species including kit foxes, black bears, and urban coyotes in Chicago. For his master's thesis, Justin studied how coyotes in Chicago affected urban Canada geese nest dynamics in Chicago. He brings a wealth of knowledge to our work in Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area where urban coyotes are a big issue. Here, he also works with bobcats in Moorpark area, studying how the 118-freeway affects their movement patterns.
Contact Information
Email: Justin_L_Brown (at) NPS.gov
Phone: 805-370-2335
Janet Foley, Ph.D.
Janet Foley is a veterinarian and disease ecologist who studies the ecology and epidemiology of infectious diseases in animal and human populations. She has a PhD in the ecology of infectious diseases (UC Davis, 1995) and a DVM (UC Davis, 1993), emphasizing medicine of small animals, laboratory animals, and wildlife. Her special interests are granulocytic anaplasmosis, Lyme disease, and plague. She has taken an interest in the notoedric mange mites affecting our local bobcat populations, and has been a critical resource aiding in the study of this disease locally.
Janet is a mom of two children (Colin and Brangwyn) and a myriad of pets, notably Cassidy the dog, Sierra, Nemo, Arana, Pascal, Milou,and Linda the cats, a few "bads", turtles, pet birds, and ducks (Georgia, June, Drew, Taylor, and Fred). She likes to read, hike, work, and travel.
Joanne Moriarty, M.S.
Joanne recieved her Master of Science from California State University in Northridge. She studied bobcat kitten development and dispersal behavior in Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area for her thesis research. She is currently a biologist at the National Park Service, continuing studies on bobcats around Los Angeles. She also is involved in small mammal studies, examining anticoagulant exposure in the frequent prey items of our local bobcats.
Contact Information
Email: Joanne_Moriarty (at) NPS.gov
Phone: 805-370-2398
Julie Newsome
Julie has had many lives, including artist and jazz singer. Julie is also passionate about wildlife, wildlife tracking, and conservation. As a Los Angeles native, she has been interested in the mountain lion project for years and now helps manage fundraising for the project. She is the Carnivore Fund Manager, volunteering her time and resources to help support the local carnivore research.
Contact Information
Contact Julie via her website here.
Miguel Ordenana, M.S.
Miguel is a Nicaraguan American who grew up in Los Angeles, CA and developed a strong interest in wildlife from a young age. He received his BA in Environmental Studies from the University of Southern California and a Master of Science degree in Ecology from the University of California, Davis where he used camera trap data to examine the effects of urbanization on carnivores of southern California. Miguel has participated in a wide variety of projects involving diverse wildlife species of California, including forest raptors, desert tortoises, ground squirrels, urban carnivores, and bats. He is currently works for the U.S. Forest Service Pacific Southwest Research Station studying bat activity pre- and post- wind turbine construction in the Mojave desert. Miguel is also one of the leaders of the Griffith Park Connectivity Study, monitoring medium- and large-bodied mammals with camera traps in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park. See more information about Miguel's jaguar research at PasoPacifico or PetriDish.
Contact Information
Email: Ordenana (at) gmail.com
Seth P.D. Riley, Ph.D.
Seth Riley grew up in Washington, D C where he first got interested in wildlife, by way of snakes. He graduated in 1988 from Stanford University with a B.A. in Human Biology, concentrating in Animal Behavior and Ecology. From 1988-1990 Seth worked as a wildlife biologist for the National Park Service at the Center for Urban Ecology in Washington. He worked on a number of urban wildlife issues there, focusing particularly on the behavioral, population, and disease ecology of urban raccoons. Seth then went to the University of California, Davis for graduate school, where he graduated with a Ph.D. in Ecology in 1999. His dissertation work was on the ecology of bobcats and gray foxes in urban and rural areas of Golden Gate National Recreation Area, just north of San Francisco. After graduating Seth worked as a post-doctoral fellow at Davis studying hybridization between native and introduced tiger salamanders in California. At the beginning of 2000, Seth began in his current position as Wildlife Ecologist with the National Park Service at Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area in southern California. His current projects, all related to the impacts of urbanization and fragmentation on wildlife, include a bobcat telemetry study, a mountain lion GPS telemetry study, stream surveys for amphibians, and pitfall/drift fence trapping to determine terrestrial reptile and amphibian distribution and abundance. Seth is also has an adjunct position at UCLA where he advises students and teaches graduate seminars. A recent project was co-editing a book on Urban Carnivores, for which Seth co-authored seven chapters.
Contact Information
Email: Seth_Riley (at) nps.gov
Phone: 805-370-2398
Tanner Saul
Tanner is a native of Agoura Hills, CA and is presently in his junior year of high school. He has a passion for wildlife biology, and has for years managed his own wildlife remote cameras in various parts of the Santa Monica Mountains. This is how he became involved with the National Park Service and UCLA. Now he volunteers to manage remote cameras in Topanga Canyon, helps with bobcat tracking, and along with Johanna Turner, is collecting interesting data on wildlife in the Verdugo Hills. During summer 2012, Tanner will increase his involvement with the National Park Service helping to check traps and manage samples collected from bobcats.
Cathy Schoonmaker
Cathy grew up in Los Angeles and has worked locally with the National Park Service on carnivore research for the past decade. She manages the carnivore intern program, recruiting 2-3 volunteer interns to work on the National Park Service carnivore project per year. She also manages the I-405 camera study sponsored by CalTrans.
Contact Information
Email: Cathy_Schoonmaker (at) NPS.gov
Phone: 805-370-2383
Laurel Klein Serieys, C.Phil.
Laurel grew up in Dallas, Texas and graduated with a B.S. in Zoology from University of Texas at Austin in 2003. Presently, Laurel is a Ph.D. Candidate at UCLA (expected graduation Dec.2012-early 2013) and National Park Service (NPS) collaborator working on bobcats in southern California. She is passionate about wild cat conservation and research, with a focus on how urban development threatens wild cat populations. She hopes that through learning about threats facing these carnivore populations, we may work towards solutions for their conservation over the long-term. Although a lifelong aspiration to study wild cats, Laurel got her start working with wild cats in 2006 as an volunteer intern with the National Park Service in Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. Soon after, she was accepted to the UCLA graduate program in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. The work she began as an intern turned into a Ph.D. dissertation project studying bobcats in an urban landscape. Her project unites UCLA lab and NPS field resources to take a novel approach to wildlife studies.
Laurel is not sure where she will head next, but is on the hunt for a postdoctoral research position to continue research on small wild cats or other carnivore species. See her resume here.
Contact Information
Email: Laurelklein (at) ucla.edu (preferred mode of contact)
Phone: 424-645-7862
Jeff Sikich
Born in Chicago and graduated from Indiana University with a bachelor's degree in Environmental Science and Management. Over the past 15 years Jeff has captured and handled over 15 carnivore species for wildlife research. His work specializes in research capture techniques for various carnivore species. He has worked on several research projects in the United States, as well as studies focused on tigers in Sumatra and jaguars and pumas in the Peruvian Amazon. Jeff has been a biologist with the National Park Service for the past 10 years researching the impacts of urbanization and habitat fragmentation on mountain lions in Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.
Contact Information
Email: Jeff_sikich (at) nps.gov
Phone: 805-370-2395
Robert K. Wayne, Ph.D.
Bob Wayne is a conservation geneticist and professor at UCLA in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. The research projects of the Wayne lab cover a wide range of species and utilize a multitude of molecular approaches. From exploring contemporary population dynamics to evolutionary relationships, current projects utilize both traditional and next-generation technologies to address ecological and evolutionary questions at a variety of spatial and temporal scales. Many of the projects explore genomes for signatures of selection (natural or artificial), local adaptaion, patterns of partitioning genetic variation across species and populations, or use a metagenomic approach to understand complex biological systems. We are also exploring protocols to preserve RNA to conduct expression studies and explore the transcriptome of wild canids.