Christian Che-Castaldo, PhD

Dr. Che-Castaldo received his Ph.D. in Behavior, Ecology, Evolution and Systematics from the University of Maryland, College Park. Dr. Che-Castaldo was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stony Brook University's Institute for Advanced Computational Science, a Research Scientist at the Mount St. Helens Institute and a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at Stony Brook University, before joining the USGS Wisconsin Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit in 2023.

Dr. Che-Castaldo is a quantitative ecologist interested in population and community ecology, primary succession, and building pipelines to facilitate species conservation. His research focuses on combining remote sensing with long-term ecological data using Bayesian hierarchical models, with an emphasis on high-performance computing, forecasting, and reproducible science. Dr. Che-Castaldo is a co-developer of the Antarctic Penguin Biogeography Project, an open-access decision support tool designed for Southern Ocean managers, scientists, and the public. He also has a long-standing interest in the ecological recovery of Mount St. Helens following its 1980 volcanic eruption.