I am an ecologist working at the interface of communities and ecosystems. After graduating from the University of Michigan, I earned a master’s degree in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation from the University of Florida researching the responses of forest bat communities to fire. I then did my PhD in Integrative Biology from UC Berkeley studying the assembly of carnivorous plant-associated microbial communities. Most recently, I spent four years conducting postdoctoral research at the University of Notre Dame and Rice University, focusing on problems related to species coexistence in fluctuating environments and teaching courses in general ecology and plant systematics.
My current research takes three general themes: the ecology of plant-microbe interactions, species coexistence in variable environments, and linkages between communities and ecosystem processes. As a natural history enthusiast, I have conducted this research across a variety of taxonomic groups (e.g., bats, insects, plants, microbes), adapting tools from other fields (e.g., biophysics, genomics, machine learning) as needed.
