My research program focuses on understanding the ways in which energy, nutrients, and contaminants are transferred and transformed by physiological and food web processes at the scales of animals to food webs to ecosystems.

Here you can learn about my work as an academic environmental scientist. Thanks to the generous funding and excellent mentoring that I’ve been privileged enough to receive over the years, I’ve managed to combine my interests in feeding animals, strolling through grocery stores (i.e., food museums!) around the world, and reading nutrition labels into a research program around nutritional ecophysiology. Sometimes I call myself a limnologist, other times an ornithologist, but I’m fundamentally interested in food webs and have studied everything from inorganic nutrients to basal resources like algae and leaf litter on up to predators like fish and birds. I started out my career as an undergrad working with Bosmina remains and bulk stable isotopes, but have since branched out into using common garden studies and most recently molecular techniques. I look forward to broadening my taxonomic and methodological breadth even further through new collaborations in the future.

I personally value the many dimensions of human diversity and am committed to developing an inclusive and equitable research group where all are welcome regardless of their race, ethnicity, and geographic origin, their physical ability, their sex, gender, and orientation, their age, their neurodiversity and mental health history, their socioeconomic and educational background, their religious and political beliefs, and their family status. I value input from my collaborators regardless of their training or seniority. My own personal experiences of imposter syndrome, living internationally and negotiating life as a non-native speaker, and parenting during a pandemic have shaped these beliefs, but I’ve also been fortunate enough to have gained additional perspectives from mentees, friends, and family who have generously shared their own experiences within academia.

Teaching and mentoring are two of my favorite aspects of academia, but please note that some of the teaching sections of my website are password protected. If you are a member of a search committee, a future mentor, a future mentee, or are otherwise interested in accessing these sections, please do not hesitate to get in touch for the password.