Better Ignorant Than Mislead

Dr. N. Thompson (Tom) Hobbs is a Senior Research Scientist at the National Resource Ecology Laboratory at Colorado State University. Tom's work focuses on using ecological models to gain new insight from data. He is particularly interested in understanding controls on population dynamics of large mammals in Western North America and Scandinavia. Tom has worked on population and community ecology of large mammals for the last three decades. Virtually all of his work uses models of ecological process to gain insight from data. He has particular expertise in building demographic models—models that are now widely used to support management and policy in North America and Europe. He has been on the faculty at Colorado State since 2001 and before that he worked for 20 years as a research scientist for the Colorado Division of Wildlife. He has served as a rotating Program Director in the Population and Community Ecology Cluster of the Division of Environmental Biology at the National Science Foundation. He is a member of the Editorial Board of Ecological Applications. Princeton University Press recently published his book (co-authored with Mevin Hooten), Bayesian Modeling: a Statistical Primer for Ecologists. Tom has a degree in general biology from Grinnell College and an MS and PhD in wildlife ecology from Colorado State University.