About Me.

I am currently a postdoc in Vadim Karatayev's lab at the University of Maryland. Previously, I was a postdoc in Topher Weiss-Lehman's lab at the University of Wyoming and did my PhD at Case Western Reserve university in Dr. Karen Abbott’s lab. I grew up in Massachusetts where I first learned about the ideas of ecology. As a young person, I was lucky enough to participate in outreach programs from local organizations like the Westport River Watershed Alliance, MassAudubon Allens Pond, and the Lloyd Center. I later volunteered with these same organizations to monitor birds, remove invasive species, and measure water quality. I completed a BA in Biology with minors in Physics and Math at Washington University in Saint Louis, graduating in 2015. I was involved in research as an undergraduate, and worked in Dr. Tiffany Knight’s lab. I did fieldwork at the Tyson Research Center, and wrote a senior thesis entitled “Phylogenetically novel species are more successful due to high competitive ability at local and regional spatial scales”, which is available through the Washington University Open Scholarship program. After that, I did an internship through the Chicago Botanic Garden with the Bureau of Land Management in Hines, Oregon. I recorded vegetation in areas affected by wildfire, monitored rare plants, and wrote about the experience in a blog. Next, I worked as a research assistant in Singapore in Dr. Roman Carrasco’s lab, doing conservation related work studying the effects of deforestation in the tropics. A paper from that project was published in PLOS ONE.