About
Jeremy Cohen, PhD
Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our time, and I’m driven to improve our understanding of how it affects wildlife and ecosystems. In my work as a quantitative ecologist, I explore how the responses of wildlife to climate change vary across many species, from regional to continental and sometimes even global extents, and across spatiotemporal scales. I work on a diverse set of ecological questions, asking how climate change influences shifting movement patterns, the timing of seasonal behaviors, species interactions, distributions and biodiversity patterns. I fuse big ecological datasets (citizen science, monitoring, lit-based) and environmental datasets (remote sensing, station-based) and apply a broad quantitative skill set, including GIS, machine learning/AI, nonlinear and mixed-effects modeling, and phylogenetic and functional analysis. I am very interested in innovating techniques, including towards making sense of citizen science data or exploring variation in species-environment relationships. Most of my work is on North American birds, but I have extensively worked on amphibians in the past and regularly collaborate on projects involving a wide range of taxonomic groups including mammals, plants and even humans. By comparing responses across species that vary in life history and functional traits, I develop frameworks to better understand and predict how diverse species and systems are responding to climate change. My history of working across disciplined and with big, broad questions has allowed me to develop collaborations with climatologists, statisticians, disease ecologists, and many others.
Education, Experience, and Personal Life
I received my Bachelor’s degree in biology from Binghamton University in May 2010 and my PhD in ecology and evolution from the University of South Florida in December 2016. I continued at USF as a postdoctoral researcher from 2017-18, then spent two years as a researcher with the University of Wisconsin and Cornell lab of Ornithology before moving to Yale University in 2021, where I am now an Associate Research Scientist. Before graduate school, I conducted research at the University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Labs and Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge in Nevada.
I’m also an avid hiker, birder, wildlife photographer and a big Yankees fan. I’ve given birding/naturalist walks for the public through Audubon and a variety of schools. I have a two year old who can already ID five bird species by sound and two charismatic cats named Toulouse and Quentin.