Background
As a high school student, meandering walks through the woods of Ohio ignited my interest in ecology and the environment. Remembering those walks, I enrolled in evolution and ecology classes at the Ohio State University and fell in love with a scientific approach to understanding the natural world. After receiving my undergraduate degree from Ohio State, I researched the relationship between forest structure and salamander occurrence in eastern Ohio as a research assistant with the Columbus Zoo & Aquarium, before going on to serve a brief stint as a surveyor in the southern United States. My interest in GIS, remote sensing, and ecology eventually took me to New Mexico State University where I completed my master’s thesis, focusing on inference of plant community interactions using LiDAR across regional and landscape scales.
I return to the study of wildlife at UW-Madison as a PhD student. My work seeks to understand the interaction between avian traits and forest structure, especially across spatial scales, by using remote sensing and citizen science data. Despite my embrace of data analysis and the scientific approach, I continue to profess the need for ecologists to be naturalists firsts. Walks in the woods sparked my love of ecology; they also preserve it.
In my free time, I like to clumsily strum on my guitar and take my pet cat on occasional walks, although he seems unsure of the Wisconsin winter.
Education:
The Ohio State University; B.S. in Evolution & Ecology, 2019.
New Mexico State University; M.S. in Plant and Environmental Science, 2023. Thesis: Density-Dependent Competition in Desert Shrubland and Global Transpiration Data.
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