Research Interests

I don't have my own research project going yet, so what follows includes my goals and experiences, but nothing original.

My main areas of interest are in evolutionary ecology and community ecology, which are the same thing on different timescales. I particularly like social insect systems, since they just have so many interesting things going on. I hope that my research will include both field research and mathematical modelling, and ideally, I will make the two meet. Wish me luck.

Towards the mathematical modelling end, I am in the second year of the master's program in Mathematical Biology in the Math department at the University of Utah. I'm still in the phase where I take classes and do problem sets, rather than the phase where I get to spend my time making my own models.

I haven't done any of my own field research either, but thanks to the IGERT summer "lab rotation," I did get to participate in someone else's. I spent June this summer at the University of Texas's Brackenridge Field Laboratory and Stengl "Lost Pines" Biology Station, working with Don Feener and members of his lab on a project investigating the competitive foraging strategies of scavenging ants. This project is funded by a grant that Professor Feener wrote with my advisor, Fred Adler. As such, it is supposed to include a mathematical modelling side, too, so eventually maybe I'll do something with that.

Before I came to Utah, I was involved in various research projects, mostly as a "biological technician." Below are some links to projects I've participated in: