About

UNDERGRADUATE EXPERIENCE

I received an undergraduate degree in Wildlife Biology from Texas State University (in beautiful San Marcos, TX).  As an undergraduate, I worked on a few research projects that included conducting surveys for the endangered Golden-cheeked Warbler, volunteering with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service in Montana to work on the Black-footed Ferret recovery project and working with Dr. Jim Ott to study plant-insect interactions between a galling wasp and oak trees (this project would prove to be very influential in my academic career).

EXPERIENCES AFTER FINISHING MY UNDERGRADUATE DEGREE

After graduating with my B.S., I first went to work with the U.S. Forest Service for two seasons; first in beautiful Wrangell, Alaska and second in the Central Sierra Nevadas of California (not to be confused with the Sierra Nevada mountains in Spain!).   While with the Forest Service, my main job was to conduct wildlife surveys, primarily of birds (but also included plants and mammals).  Towards the end of my second season with the Forest Service, I was lucky to get a job working on a project through the University of California at Davis.  I worked with a post-doc  on a project in the Northern Sierras / Southern Cascades, aimed at surveying small mammal populations.  The overall project was to monitor and understand the viability of the endangered Spotted Owl.  After working on that project, I contacted and soon began working with another professor at Davis, Jay Rosenheim.  Working in the Rosenheim lab, I again worked on a plant-insect interaction project, mostly with another galling insect and its host plant.  While I loved working with birds and mammals, there was something about plant-insect interactions that really inspired me.  While on this project, I started looking into and and applying for graduate school.

BEGINNING GRADUATE SCHOOL

I went to graduate school at Northern Arizona University (NAU) in Flagstaff, Arizona where I studied with Tom Whitham and Steve Shuster.   Working with Tom Whitham, I was indoctrinated into the community genetics perspective.  Further, I was lucky to be officially housed in the lab of Steve Shuster, who is very quantitative in his own right and helped foster similar perspectives and skill sets in myself.  While in graduate school, I had a few other very influential experiences.  During my first year of graduate school, both of my advisors (Tom Whitham and Steve Shuster) were on sabbatical.  During that time a few things happened.  First, I was lucky that two post-docs at NAU, Joe Bailey and Jen Schweitzer, mentored me a great deal during that time.  In fact, because of their guidance, I published my first two papers as a graduate student (a paper on geographically varying natural selection and another one on plant-soil interactions and local adaptation in plants). Second, during my first semester of graduate school, I read a book by John Thompson (The Geographic Mosaic Theory of Coevolution).  This book had and continues to have a very significant influence on my research perspective.

SINCE FINISHING MY PH.D.

After finishing my Ph.D., I became an instructor at NAU where I taught a graduate-level course in Biostatistics.  Soon thereafter, I began a post-doc with Matt Bowker (and via the U.S. Geological Survey).

I served as a visiting assistant professor at Denison University (a liberal arts university ~30 miles east of Columbus, Ohio). While there, I taught Ecology & Evolution, Ornithology and Introductory Biology.  I also realized that I love teaching and mentoring students.

I am now preparing to move to Claremont, California where I will be a visiting professor in the Keck Science Department (which is a joint science department among Claremont McKenna College, Scripps College and Pitzer College).

I am interested in understanding the interplay between ecological and evolutionary forces.  It is important to consider that ecology and evolution go hand-in-hand.  That is, ecological processes, such as species interactions, often act as agents of natural selection to cause (rapid) evolution of interacting populations.  That evolution in turn may alter how the population interacts with other species.   page or Research.