Team eBird

eBird Project Leader

Chris began birding at age five and still gets into the field enough to make the rest of us jealous. His primary interests include bird distribution, identification, vocalizations and conservation throughout the Americas. In addition to his work at the Lab, Chris leads birding tours for WINGS to the U.S., Canada, Mexico and Central America. He is a editor for the Colorado and Wyoming region of North American birds and the departmental editor of the BIRDING photo quiz, as well as the online photo quiz for the American Birding Association. He has written and consulted on various books, popular, and scientific literature on North American birds. Before coming to the Lab, Chris was a research associate with Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory in Colorado. 

Contact: clw37@cornell.edu

Brian Sullivan
eBird Project Leader

Brian Sullivan has conducted fieldwork on birds throughout North America for the past twelve years. Birding travels and field projects have taken him to Central and South America, to the Arctic and across North America. He has written and consulted on various books, popular, and scientific literature on North American birds. Research interests include migration, conservation biology, seabirds, raptors and field identification. He currently serves as photo editor for the Birds of North America Online and for the American Birding Association publication North American Birds.

Contact: bls42@cornell.edu

Marshall Iliff
eBird Project Leader

Marshall Iliff began birding at age 11 and has been birding obsessively ever since. After college he conducted several years of Ornithological field work across the US and in Mexico, often working and traveling with Chris and Brian. He has worked on three state records committees, as North American Birds Regional Editor for two different regions on two different coasts, as well as on a number of other articles and books relating to birds, bird identification, and bird distribution. From 2000-2007 he was a full-time tour leader for Victor Emanuel Nature Tours, traveling across the United States and Canada, as well as through much of Central America and Mexico, and even as far as Kenya. Regretting his intermittent note taking through all those travels, he is making up for it now by entering whatever old checklists he can find into eBird!

Contact: mji26@cornell.edu

Tim Lenz
eBird Application Programmer

Tim Lenz was born in Rochester, NY, spent 2nd through 5th grade in Ithaca, NY, and lived in Reno, NV until attending school at Cornell University. He first became interested in birds at the age of nine, when he demanded to go birding at Sapsucker Woods every weekend.

In Reno, Tim enjoyed downhill skiing, springboard diving, and computer games. He was two-time Nevada state diving champion and continued diving for Cornell as an undergraduate in the Engineering school. At Cornell, Tim realized there were other birders his age, so he became very active in the student birding club. He received a master's degree at Cornell in Computer Science in May 2004 and spent the summer in Reno working for an IT company that maps forest fires.

At the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, Tim will be using Java technologies to upgrade and maintain the eBird website.

Contact: tcl6@cornell.edu

Jeff Gerbracht
Application Developer

Jeff has always had a very strong interest in natural history, which was encouraged by his family during their summer travels. His love of birds began when he was 9 and has continued ever since. His professional career has focused on project management and computer programming and his interest in ornithology and conservation led him to leave American Airlines and join the Lab as an application developer in 2001. He has developed several interactive GIS, data entry and analysis modules and applications for the Lab, including eBird, the Land Bird Monitoring Program and a Breeding Bird Atlas application. Jeff is currently developing a Citizen Science internet application to monitor and track the threatened Florida Scrub-Jay.

Tom Fredericks
Database Administrator

Tom first came to the Lab in 1997 as the Database Specialist for the then fledgling BirdSource group. He, together with Steve Kelling built the beginnings of what has grown into the Lab IS department. Prior to working at the Lab, he was a database manager and application developer at the Cornell College of Veterinary Medicine.

Tom is responsible for database design and administration for the Lab of Ornithology's Bird Monitoring projects, working closely with co-DBA Tim Levatich to make up the Lab's Database Team. His database design projects include Project FeederWatch, eBird, The Great Backyard Bird Count, National Audubon's Christmas Bird Count, Birds in Forested Landscapes, and many others.

Tim Levatich
Database Administrator

Tim Levatich is a database designer and administrator at the Lab, assisting many departments and projects with a broad range of data management initiatives. His activities include the development of new databases and metadata publishing techniques for audio and video assets in the Macaulay Library, the management of the Lab's membership and bird monitoring databases, and the administration of our Oracle servers and data storage systems.

Tim came to the Lab in 2001 with data management experience in government, facilities administration, and the transportation industry, plus a strong interest and background in natural resource management. He is looking forward to the development of a scalable database infrastructure and metadata schemes that will allow the Lab to meet its data output demands from all people interested in birds and biodiversity.

Will Morris
Web/UI Designer

Will has been designing web sites and user interfaces for over ten years. He is responsible for the usability and visual design of Information Science sites and applications.

Daniel Fink
Research Associate Statistician

Daniel came to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in 2005 from the Department of Statistical Science to work on the creation of the Avian Knowledge Network. He works jointly with researchers at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the Computer Science Department to develop models of population abundance and distribution. His research centers on developing highly adaptive, semi-parametric regression tools for challenging problems in environmental and ecological sciences. Topics of interest include hierarchical models, decision trees, data mining, and shrinkage estimation.

Paul Allen
Assistant Director

Paul's background in computer science and ecology (M.S. Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon U., 1991; M.S. Organismal Biology and Ecology, U. Montana, 1998) serve him well as software architect and head of software development for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (CLO) Information Science (IS) department. Since joining the CLO staff in 1997 and the IS department in 1999, Paul has focused on building software systems to collect bird monitoring information from citizen scientists. Most recently Paul has helped bring the "Birds of North America" into the digital age and will be building a new framework to create communities focused on scientific references such as the "Birds of North America."

While work on birds has taken Paul from Panama and the Bahamas to Alaska, the most important thing to him is using his skills for conservation.

Steve Kelling
Director of Information Science

Steve Kelling has always had a personal interest in birds and bird watching, which began while growing up along the Delaware Bay shore in Cumberland Co New Jersey. From this beginning he has had a long interest in organizing the rich information resources of field observations of birds gathered by bird-watchers into a cohesive data resource for inventorying the abundance and distribution of wild bird populations.

Steve first came to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (CLO) in 1997 from the Applied and Engineering Physics program at Cornell University to work on the creation of BirdSource. A joint program with Audubon, the goal of BirdSource was to develop Internet applications that engage bird-watchers in citizen science projects focused on birds.

At the Cornell Lab of Ornithology he is responsible for managing an extremely dedicated group of technology professionals who are bringing advances in Information Science (IT) to the field of Ornithology.

Steve's primary interests and responsibilities revolve around four broad topics: the development of Internet data gathering tools for observational-based monitoring projects, the use of novel digital library strategies to create global communities of interested users centered around primary scientific references, the organization of the rich data resources of the bird-monitoring community and integrating these resources within existing bioinformatic infrastructures, and using unique computer science strategies to analyze the distribution and abundance of wild bird populations.