In Lake Erie, walleye is a fish mostly popular with recreational fishermen. Those fishermen may or may not be aware of the scientific links that affect their population.

Anderson’s sophisticated analyses incorporates environmental factors into models that enable resource managers to make better decisions about preserving fish stocks. For example, he traced tree cover in surrounding areas to stream run-off to the affect of increased water flow on larval walleye. Generally, spikes of increased flow tend to wash away the unhatched larva.

Fishermen may not need to know that, but environmental resource managers do. It helps them choose which restoration projects to pursue, where to locate them and how to optimize their resources.

Such information also helps balance out the competing interests of those using the lake for recreational or commercial uses. Anderson’s approach is to help them see scientific links and to better clarify the choices before them.

“They’re responsible for the integrity of the ecosystem, but this has to be defined,” he says. “The way to go about it is to balance different objectives … I am trying to show that even within a healthy environment, we have a range of choices.”

But along with the scientific data, Anderson tries to incorporate human input into the decision equation.

“Values are critical,” he says. “What do people want? What are people willing to pay for what they want or for a given improvement? People avoid the conflict of trade-off choices. But you need to explicitly embrace that.”

The aim of Anderson’s work is to bring together many varieties of raw scientific data and to incorporate decision-making models to enable people like resource managers to make better decisions.

Decision-making analysis is more commonly a subject studied and applied in business schools. Its goal is to make decision making less abstract and subjective, more concrete and qualitative. Last year, Anderson’s paper “Using a Bayesian Approach to Quantifying Compatibility Scale Bias,” co-written with colleague Benjamin F. Hobbs of Johns Hopkins and published in the journal Management Science, was awarded first prize in an annual competition by the Decision Making Analysis society.

Interdisciplinary approaches are fundamental to the mission of the NicholasSchool. Anderson, whose father is an economist at HowardUniversity, was actually referred to the school by faculty at the Fuqua School of Business for his work with decision-making analysis.

Born in Maryland, Anderson spent his younger years in his parents’ native Jamaica. Growing up in Kingston gave him a taste for cricket and soccer, which made him a bit of an outsider when the family returned to Maryland. By the time Anderson graduated high school, he was running track, playing basketball and served as president of his school’s student government. His strength in science and math pushed him toward engineering.

After undergraduate work at Johns Hopkins, he took a job in mechanical engineering at a nuclear plant. He decided to pursue a master’s a few years later; after returning to Hopkins, he became fascinated with fluid dynamics. From there, he became interested in natural phenomenon and environmental issues affecting water bodies. His new interdisciplinary approach crystallized as he proposed his doctoral work.

Though he had never been particularly interested in environmentalism, “I wanted to be able to make science-based decisions to better manage the environment,” he says.

After attaining his Ph.D., Anderson did post-doctoral work at the National Weather Service and then moved on to the Department of Agriculture for a year-long fellowship from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Now at Duke, he’s preparing to share his approach in a spring master’s level class, “Environmental Decision Analysis.”