About | L. Scott Mills

About Scott

I am a Professor Emeritus who spent a career as a globally engaged conservation biologist, National Science Foundation Early Career Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, Fulbright Scholar, and prolific author of 150+ scientific articles and books, including “Conservation of Wildlife Populations”, recently published in the third edition. Other high points (for details see my CV) include advising 30 amazing graduate students (16 PhD, 14 MS) and hundreds of undergraduates, receiving more than 50 successful competitive grants totaling > $10 million, and lots of media coverage ranging from Netflix shows to The New York Times, The Atlantic, BBC, National Geographic, and more.

The focus of my studies has been the lives and deaths of wild animals – using data from hard-core field studies with live traps and radiotelemetry and DNA collection and such – to figure out how human actions affect wildlife populations. This research area of wildlife population ecology opened doors to finding win-win conservation actions to recover endangered species and support sustainable harvests.

I got to do all that as a professor in the top-tier University of Montana Wildlife Biology Program for 30 years (with a 3 year stint at NC State University). The work took me around the world as I taught workshops and classes, built research capacity, and helped guide on-the-ground conservation planning. Here's my old Univ. MT website.

My two amazing kids, Nick and Linnea, came along on many of these outings, from the wilds of Montana to the Himalayas of Bhutan. Here’s a biography of me that 16-year old Linnea wrote during her 2018 semester abroad in Australia.

My world shattered on November 1, 2020, when Linnea, almost 19, was killed in the most negligent training class in the history of scuba diving. After a 1,000 day siege for justice and accountability for those whose negligence caused her death, accompanied by other losses, in late 2023 I retired and moved to an island surrounded by whales in the Puget Sound of Washington State.

Now I’m spending quality time fishing, shrimping, skiing, and taking long walks along rocky shores. Sunrise. Blossoming. And I’m also still doing science stuff: mentoring students, collaborating on research papers, poking my head out of the marmot burrow (inside biology joke 😊) to potentially teach and build new research collaborations.

And: I am telling the story of Linnea, all of it. I’m writing a book. And a documentary film is being produced.

Thank you for stopping by!

Teaching & Short Courses

My teaching has focused primarily on the population-dynamic wonders of wild creatures on earth, and how we can harness field and genetic data, and computational models, to uncover surprising insights into how human actions affect population increases, decreases, and responses to human pressures. At the undergraduate level, I taught freshman-level Field Biology Techniques, sophomore-level General Ecology, and Conservation of Wildlife Populations ("CWP"; the applied population ecology class for which no textbook existed, so I had to write one).

At the graduate student level I taught multiple advanced versions of these topics, with names like "Advanced Applied Population Ecology", "Population Modeling to Recover Endangered Species and Guide Sustainable Harvest", and so on. In Europe and Asia, where 1 or 2-week intensive graduate classes are popular, I enjoyed that deep-dive format.

Finally, I've done a bunch of workshops for practitioners, including state and federal agencies charged with how to use best available science to prioritize actions to recover endangered species or set sustainable harvest limits.

With the overhauled 3rd edition of CWP newly hitting the streets, and the need for science-based optimism in wildlife conservation greater than ever, I continue to be keen to teach versions of these classes or others.