My research focuses on human-environmental dynamics and archaeological histories of maritime/coastal hunter-gatherers especially in the North Pacific. This research addresses questions of human vulnerability and resilience in remote subarctic environments. I collaborate widely with scholars across a range of disciplines in atmospheric, earth and biological sciences and take an historical ecological perspective on human adjustments to (and of) environments in which they live. Recent efforts include the development of international collaborations to explore the ecological and archaeological histories of the North Pacific Rim. I am coordinating a comparative marine ecological working group called Paleoecology of Subarctic Seas (PESAS), which brings together paleoclimate, paleoecology, archaeology and history to investigate similarities and differences in the human-environmental co-evolution the subarctic North Pacific and North Atlantic since the Last Glacial Maximum. I am currently Director of the Quaternary Research Center at the University of Washington, and in this role, seek to promote interdisciplinary scholarship into the evolution of the earth surface (and the role of humans in it) over the past two and a half million years. I am also a founding member of the UW Future of Ice Initiative.