Member

Brent was born December 19, 1961, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and shortly thereafter moved to Bluffton, Indiana, with his father William Joseph and mother Rebecca. The oldest of seven children, Brent has always felt a close affinity to nature, perhaps stemming from his Amish family lineage. He spent his childhood fishing for bass on local farm ponds, building his collection of butterflies and moths, which won first prize in his fifth grade science fair, and wandering the surrounding corn fields in search of Native American artifacts. In 1986, Brent graduated from the University of South Carolina at Columbia with a bachelor’s degree in marine science with an emphasis in biology. During his summer break from classes Brent was employed by the Indiana Department of Fish and Game conducting creel surveys and as an interpretive naturalist for Indiana State Parks. After graduation he severed as a Peace Corps volunteer with the Parks and Wildlife Program in Guatemala, and then headed north to work on commercial crab and fishing vessels in the Bering Sea as a biological observer contracted to the Alaskan Department of Fish and Game. The call of warmer weather lead Brent to the border of Bolivia and Brazil where he spent six months inventorying fish along the Guapore River before entering his federal career with the National Park Service in 1995 as a biologist for National Capital Parks-East. In 2003, he accepted the position of natural resources program manager for another unit of the National Park Service, the George Washington Memorial Parkway, where he currently oversees all aspects of the park’s inventory and monitoring program and serves as regional representative to the National Inventory and Monitoring Advisory Committee. Brent’s personal research interests have focused on the distribution of threatened and endangered vascular plants on the Mid-Atlantic Coastal Plain. In conjunction with his research Brent has authored 14 journal articles, numerous technical reports, and discovered more than a dozen vascular plants that were new records for the floras of Maryland, Virginia, or the District of Columbia. Brent was elected to membership of the Washington Biologists’ Field Club in 2006.