Brian Napoletano holds a PhD from the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources at Purdue University, a MS from the Department of Zoology at Michigan State University, and a BA from the Department of Telecommunication (now the Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media) at the same. While studying at Purdue, he worked with Bryan Pijanowski in the HEMA Laboratory on a number of projects pertaining to land-use change, spatial modeling, and biogeography. His Doctoral dissertation focused on correlations between land-use trends and avian species-richness within the contiguous United States. He also gained experience in political ecology, environmental monitoring, remote sensing, various GIS and statistical analysis, theoretical ecology, and data visualization.

Prior to studying at Purdue University, Brian worked with Stuart Gage at Michigan State University as both an undergraduate and graduate research assistant on the development of conceptual and methodological frameworks for the interpretation of acoustic signals in the environment. Using his knowledge of telecommunication technologies, Brian helped to develop prototype sound sensors, and integrated his technical expertise into his ecological studies. His Master's thesis focused on both the technological and theoretical aspects of soundscape analysis.

Brian's primary research interests are in the biophysical and societal dimensions of environmental change. As the proportion of humans living in cities recently passed fifty percent, he is particularly interested in the challenges associated with maintaining ecosystem services in urban landscapes. Other research interests include the geographical and biophysical determinants of avian species richness and the role of auditory communication in community interactions.

Because he frequently works with comparatively large and complex datasets, Brian has invested significant time and effort into understanding the basic aspects of data visualization and multivariate statistical analysis. He works extensively with free software for scientific computing, including GRASS GIS, the R statistical computing language, Bash, the Python programming language, and MySQL databases. For practical reasons, he has also retained a degree of proficiency with ArcGIS and other proprietary systems.

In addition to his research, Brian has had several opportunities to teach at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. He served as an instructor and coordinator for an introductory (honors) earth-systems science course at Michigan State University, and assisted with a number of graduate and undergraduate courses on remote sensing, GIS, and environmental change at Purdue. He is presently an adjunct faculty member at the University of Detroit Mercy, where he is teaching a course on environmental science. Brian has also been awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México to research urban ecology in Morelia, Michoacán at the Centro de Investigaciones en Geografía Ambiental, which he is looking forward to beginning in January.