Research

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

1. How does organismal behavior reflect the past and current environments (social and physical) in which organisms find themselves?

Broadly, I am interested in how evolution shapes behavior to reflect the environments and experiences of organisms. I study this through the ways organisms compete with one another, find (and avoid being) food, and reproduce.

Prior to my current position, and to some degree still today, the majority of my work has concerned communication and reproductive life history in sexual selection. I’m fascinated by how males and females make mating decisions, and what impact those decisions have on the evolution of species. I sought (and am still seeking!) 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, decay, or become unreliable. 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 broader, phylogenetic and observational approaches since in which I 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.