I am a plant and quantitative ecologist interested in population and community responses to environmental variability. I am currently a post-doctoral research ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey's Southwest Biological Science Center, where I work to understand the environmental variables that influence plant regeneration in the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau. My research synthesizes existing knowledge about priority restoration species to develop new models to forecast plant establishment in western US drylands.

I completed my 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. As part of my dissertation, I used demographic observations to ask questions about life history evolution and temporal variability in population dynamics. Specifically, I worked with long-term data on Clarkia xantiana collected by Monica Geber's (Cornell University; my advisor), David Moeller's (University of Minnesota), and Vince Eckhart's (Grinnell College) labs. I tested whether variation in seed dormancy across the populations of Clarkia xantiana was explained by bet hedging. For a separate project, I used the long-term demographic observations to evaluate how temporal variability in demography changes across Clarkia xantiana's geographic range.

I also developed statistical models for seed bag burial and seed addition experiments, and evaluated these models with simulations. Finally, I worked on a project focused on understanding how patterns of plant development interact with variation season length to shape life history trade-offs.

Critically examining my own teaching as a graduate student also led me to be involved with research on how instructional practices and teaching strategies influence student experiences in the classroom, as well as student outcomes such as grades.

Keywords: population ecology, demography, evolutionary ecology, community ecology, coexistence theory