I am a plant and quantitative ecologist interested in population and community responses to environmental variability. I am an assistant researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, where I work on projects related to plant demography, life histories, and post-fire restoration. My work is motivated by questions about how organisms and populations respond to environmental variation across time and space. Currently, I study perennial grasses in sagebrush steppe ecosystems of the Great Basin and the California winter annual plant Clarkia xantiana.

Previously, I was a research ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey's Southwest Biological Science Center, where I worked to understand the environmental variables that influence plant regeneration in the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau. To support post-fire restoration seeding in western US drylands, my research synthesized data about and developed ecological forecasts for priority restoration species.

I completed a PhD in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University. I studied plant populations and the causes and consequences of variation in life histories. My research addressed questions about life history evolution and temporal variability in population dynamics using long-term demographic data from populations of a California winter annual plant, Clarkia xantiana. I also studied how life history trade-offs are shaped by interactions between plant development and variation in season length.