Holds a MSc in Ecology (Florida State University) and has worked over 25 years developing  applied solutions for confronting changes facing terrestrial (dry and humid forests), coastal (rivers, mangroves and coastal lagoons) and marine (corals and seagrasses) biodiversity and placing people at the center of those solutions. This work has laid a foundation for building context-specific resilience mechanisms that are essential for the survival of those ecosystems and the well-being of the people who depend on them. He has developed a number of ecosystem and socio-centric monitoring systems in marine protected areas, Biosphere Reserves and Ramsar Sites that measure the State, Pressure and Effectiveness of Interventions aimed at confronting the root causes of those Pressures, including Climate Change.  At the heart of this approach is a learning-based (adaptive) process for discovering context-specific governance arrangements and management tools that can help create greater resilience within the planet’s resources.

Most recently he has worked evaluating and/or formulating large donor programs (IUCN, WB-GEF, EU, Danida) in coastal-marine biodiversity conservation (Viet Nam, Western Africa), sustainable fisheries (Team Leader for the evaluating of Fish 2 in seventy-nine ACP countries) and climate change  covering large geographical areas.  He served as the project leader the Social and Environmental Assessment component of the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) projects in with MCA-Nicaragua and MCA-Honduras. He has worked with the Mozambican and Danish Governments to help establish coastal and marine protected areas and provide legal protection for the largest populations of manta rays and whale sharks in the world.  He has worked as Team leader and /or Project director for biodiversity and sustainable tourism projects in Mozambique, Viet Nam, Malaysia, Laos, Egypt and Ghana. Within the past 5 years he has twice led large multi-disciplinary teams to conduct the first EIAs for offshore hydrocarbon exploration on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua funded by the private sector to develop SEAs and EIAs for infrastructure development projects (funded by the World Bank and Danida) that were located in Ramsar and other Protected Areas, as well as led a team to carry out an EIA of a large Geothermal Project in northern Nicaragua.