Research

In my undergrad, I worked on a project forecasting the effects of climate change on alpine amphibians and, in particular, how activity periods dictated by critical temperature and water loss limits are likely to be impacted by hotter and drier summers.

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In my PhD, I am working to more broadly understand the impacts of human land-use on ecological communities of Anolis lizards in the Greater Antilles. 

As with many in EEB, I spend a lot of my time on my computer wrangling scripts in R to tell me meaningful things about my data, and ideally, my study systems.  I am an enthusiastic R user and am always on the look-out for new programming tools and statistical approaches. 

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I am also passionate about teaching R and making it more accessible both through mentorship, courses, and workshops.

Throughout my university education, I've become increasingly interested in the relationships between ecology and evolution and whether we can detect the signature of these different processes at varying spatial scales. 

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There is no better system than to test these ideas than the Anolis lizards (there may be, but the Anoles make up for a lot with their winning personalities). Through extensive community-level mark-resample surveys, we can connect local processes and abundance to evolutionary history both within and between islands of the Greater Antilles.  Click here more info on my current adventures in the field and here for some cool drone videos by post doc Dan Nicholson. 

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This work is done in collaboration between the Mahler lab at University of Toronto and the Frishkoff lab at University Texas, Arlington.