Sean is a Staff Scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, and an adjunct Professor of Marine Biology at James Cook University, Australia. He is interested in the spatial and temporal dynamics of biodiversity across a broad range of scales, from individual-level processes (behavior, energetics, and biomechanics) that influence demography or niche space, to ecological interactions and their effects on mesoscale and regional-scale patterns and dynamics of community composition and abundance, to long-term, global dynamics of biodiversity in the fossil record. His research combines theoretical and statistical modeling with field and laboratory-based empirical approaches. Since 2000, he has focused mainly on coral reef ecosystems, including the effects of anthropogenic activity on coral reefs.

Sean received his B.A. in Biology from Earlham College in Indiana, USA in 1994, and a PhD in Biological Sciences from Stanford University in 1999, where he studied effects of benthic-oceanic coupling on species interactions in Northeast Pacific rocky intertidal ecosystems. He then undertook a two-year postdoctoral fellowship with the Research Training Group in Biological Diversification at the University of Arizona, where he adapted multinomial models from the mark-recapture literature to disentangle macroevolutionary dynamics of benthic marine taxa during the Ordovician Radiation from variation in the quality and completeness of the fossil record. In 2000, he moved to James Cook University to develop a research, research training, and teaching program in ecological modeling applied to coral reefs. He moved to STRI in 2019, where he is currently based (see Research page for current projects).

During his career, Sean has supervised or co-supervised 21 PhD students and 11 postdoctoral fellows, whose research findings underpin most of the more than 130 peer-reviewed papers on which Sean is an author or co-author. In 2008, Sean received an Australian Professorial Fellowship from the Australian Research Council, and in 2009, he was awarded the Fenner Medal by the Australian Academy of Science, which recognizes outstanding research in the biological scientists by a scientist under 40. He was named a Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher in 2020. Additionally, Sean received JCU’s Advisor of the Year award in 2017, and he won two national Australian Citations for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning, in 2006 and 2014, for his coursework teaching.