My research focuses on understanding the ecology, conservation, and life-history of amphibians and reptiles. I'm especially interested in how animals interact with their environment, specifically how anthropogenic disturbances influence movements, habitat selection, energetics, and population structure of species. My goal is to integrate ecological techniques to answer physiological and evolutionary questions relating to ectotherms.
About Me
When I’m not out in the woods flipping rocks and logs for herps I spend most of my free time kayaking, traveling, and photographing wildlife. Until high school, I spent the majority of my early childhood in South America where I picked up Spanish as a second language. I moved to North Carolina where I attended University of North Carolina at Pembroke for four years and received my B.S in Environmental Science. Following that, I lived in Clarksville, Tennessee for three years where I finished my master’s degree in Biology from Austin Peay State University. For a little over a year I taught biology & earth sciences at a title 1 school in downtown Memphis, Tennessee. I then was awarded an Australian Government RTP scholarship to pursue my Ph.D. at the Institute for Applied Ecology at the University of Canberra, ACT, Australia. I then did a postdoc in the Noble lab at the Research School of Biology at Australian National University. Here I worked on applying meta-analytic approaches to investigate how developmental environments influence reptile thermal traits. I'm now a postdoc at University of Melbourne in the Climate and Metabolic Ecology Lab (CAMEL). Here I'm developing the framework to build a functional trait database for mechanistic niche models and working on some other cool legacy datasets on lizards from Eric Pianka's field work in the 70's.
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