Research

I’m a generally curious person who loves to ask questions. My two main areas of current research interest are:

1. How are traits used in reproductive life history and mating decisions?

Broadly, I am interested in how communication affects sexual selection. In particular, I study how males and females make mating decisions, and what impact those decisions have on the evolution of species. I seek to understand which factors communicate with whom to mate, how the “best” mate might change with ecological and evolutionary time, and what consequences result when decision-making factors, such as visual cues, are altered or decay. I am interested in whether traits trade off in importance for mating decisions and reproductive life history, and how demography and environmental conditions might plastically alter what traits to express (and when). This work formed the foundation of my dissertation, and has inspired broad, phylogenetic and observational approaches to investigate the potential connections between life history, mating decisions, and environmental change.

2. How do we learn and communicate biology?

As an instructor and passionate science enthusiast, I am fascinated by the ways we conceptualize and communicate science. The methods we use to convey understanding and awe are broad, and I’d like to learn the best approaches to help foster appreciation and knowledge, specifically around how we describe and use numbers and graphs to convey biology. My work has focused on how students acquire and adjust their ideas about evolution, ecology, and quantitative reasoning in biology, and what techniques can best be used to instruct. My past projects have addressed how evolution understanding changes over time, how feedback impacts performance, and how feature-extraction of pop-culture science writing can promote interesting, relatable, and factually correct works. My current work addresses classroom conditions, test-taking strategies, and digital technologies that make learning (and the barriers to it) apparent and responsive to positive change.