I was born and grew up in southwestern Ohio, in a small university town called Oxford. I studied to a Bachelors of Science (1985) at Miami University, in the Department of Zoology, where I was mentored by David Osborne. From there, I went to the University of Chicago, to study in the Committee on Evolutionary Biology and at the Field Museum of Natural History, where I was mentored by John Fitzpatrick, Scott Lanyon, and Stuart Altmann. I completed a masters degree in 1987, and my PhD in 1990. I then was an unemployed PhD (the proverbial "unpaid postdoc"!) for a year, then did a postdoc at the Field Museum (1991-1992), and then spent one year as Curator of Birds at the Field Museum (1992-1993).

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In 1993, I made the move to the University of Kansas, where I was to curate the bird collection in the Natural History Museum and teach in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. I have been at KU ever since.

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My research initially focused in the area of systematic ornithology--my interests are particularly in the area of geographic differentiation and speciation, although I have worked with phylogeny and morphology as well. As of the late 1990s, I began working in the area of distributional ecology, exploring ideas and tools such as ecological niche modeling. About the same time, I also began exploring the application of ideas from distributional ecology to questions of disease biogeography and disease risk mapping. Most recently, I have become very interested in historical ecology, specifically in how landscape history influences current distributions of species and biological communities.

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My companion in life is Rosa Salazar-Peterson. Our family includes two grown kids, a daughter-in-law now adopted as daughter, and two granddaughters. Also two dogs, an ever-changing number of cats, and a forest-worth of plants.