Jake Goheen

I am a lucky fellow because I get paid to do what I love to do. I am an academic generalist and I try hard to be a conservation biologist, community ecologist, and mammalogist simultaneously. I am interested in both applied issues and basic questions in ecology. Through my research and that of our group, I try to understand how species interactions can inform wildlife conservation and management. I draw liberally from the concepts underpinning modern community ecology to develop hypotheses, and then I test predictions of these hypotheses with a combination of field experiments, long-term data, and statistical analyses. In many of my research programs, I make every effort to ensure that work generates transparent applications to on-the-ground conservation efforts. Please see my research interests.

Training graduate students has been a central focus of my career thus far, and I find it to be the most challenging and rewarding perk of the job. I am always looking for new additions—graduate students, postdocs, undergraduate students—to our group who are altruistic, creative, enthusiastic, motivated, and sharp. Projects in our group typically involve some aspect of community ecology with clear applications to real-world conservation, or some aspect of conservation rooted in ecological concepts. Please see my mentoring philosophy.

Sometimes I get to have fun outside of biology by playing music, doing stuff outside, grilling, and rewatching the original trilogy.