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Biography:

Alan believes strongly in an interdisciplinary approach to academia and has undergraduate degrees in both Religion and Music Education. After his undergraduate training, Alan taught music in an Ozark Mountain public school system. He then spent several years performing nationally in theatre, opera, and musical comedy. Alan returned to school at the University of Michigan and obtained both an M.S. in Natural Resource Policy and a law degree (J.D.). Following a six-month stint studying endangered species law and policy in New Zealand and Australia, Alan joined a major Northwest law firm and began a land conservation law practice.

While in New Zealand, Alan encountered his first penguins – the yellow-eyed penguin (Megadyptes antipodes). He was never able to get the incredible vision of wild penguins or his childhood dream of studying birds out of his mind. And eventually hearing the call of the wild, Alan left his law practice and began studying Magellanic penguins (Spheniscus magellanicus) for his Ph.D. dissertation under the guidance and direction of P. Dee Boersma (Homo sapien) at the University of Washington, Department of Biology.

In addition, to his land conservation law practice, Alan has worked as a legal intern for both Environmental Defense and the National Wildlife Federation, as a research fellow for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and as a visiting legal research fellow at the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society of New Zealand.

Current Interests and Research:

Alan’s dissertation research was primarily field-based and focused on the behavioral ecology of Magellanic penguins. In particular, Alan used playback experiments and observation to explore the role of vocalizations in individual recognition and assessing male quality, female mate choice, and social facilitation of breeding behavior. Alan is interested not only in the function of calls, but also in the evolutionary relationship of calls within and between species. His research is focused on several scales ranging from individual choice to colony-wide patterns of behavior.

Alan finished his Ph.D. in 2006 and later completed a post-doctoral position with Sievert Rohwer at the University of Washington’s Burke Museum where he studied the vocalizations of several Pacific Northwest Dendroica warblers in zones of hybridization and sympatry.

Although his primary focus is now behavioral ecology, Alan maintains strong connections to the fields of environmental law and natural resource policy. Because of Alan’s diverse, multi-disciplinary background, he continues to publish papers that focus on the intersection of law, policy, and science in wildlife conservation issues. For example, articles Alan wrote on taxonomic bias in conservation research appeared both in Science (Clark and May 2002) and Conservation in Practice (Clark and May 2002). Concurrently with his primary dissertation research on the behavioral ecology of Magellanic penguins, Alan was deeply involved in a joint project of the Society for Conservation Biology and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service which conducted an analysis of U.S. Endangered Species Act recovery plans. Alan was lead author of the main summary paper from that meta analysis (Clark et al. 2002).

In addition to continuation of his vocalization studies of Magellanic penguins and Dendroica warblers, Alan plans to develop research projects at Fordham’s Louis J. Calder Biological Field Station and engage in collaborative research projects with the Wildlife Conservation Society as well as other conservation organizations. Alan is keenly interested in supporting both undergraduate and graduate student research projects.

Recent Publications: