Jeffrey Nicolaisen is a Ph.D. student in the Graduate Program in Religion. Nicolaisen earned his B.A. at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and his M.Eng. in civil engineering from Nagoya University in Nagoya, Japan. Subsequently, he worked as an environmental consultant for several years before deciding to pursue a Ph.D. in religion. To transition into the field of religion, he first earned an M.A. in Asian Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, then joined the Asian Religions track of the Ph.D. program in Religion at Duke. Nicolaisen is interested in the environmental humanities and studies the relationship between religion and ecology. As a Fulbright-Hays DDRA scholar, Nicolaisen will research the human, dog, and monkey interactions in Taiwan and how indigenous people, Buddhists, Christians, conservation biologists, animal rights activists, and other groups see these animals and their ecological relationships differently. The intent is to draw from the multiple cultures of Taiwan to re-examine how to understand the ecological challenges of the twenty-first century.