Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Oxford

I am an ecologist interested in population dynamics and life history evolution. My work covers a variety of topics including population regulation and resilience, the role of reproductive traits and early life history events, and comparative demography.

I am currently working as a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Oxford in the Biology Department. I am a member of the SalGo Team, and also a College Lecturer in Biology at Balliol College. My position is funded by a NERC “Pushing the Frontiers” grant led by Rob Salguero-Gómez with co-investigators Iain Stott (Univ. of Lincoln) and Andy Hector (Oxford). This project will build on previous work on population resilience, expanding our mathematical and theoretical tools for studying resilience to apply to more realistic populations, disturbance regimes, and across hierarchical levels: from individuals, to populations, to communities.

In my doctoral thesis work, I focused on the distribution, growth, and transport of larval fishes. My thesis included chapters about tropical tuna spawning in the Phoenix Islands Protected Area (central tropical Pacific), Atlantic bluefin tuna spawning in the Slope Sea, and a trait-based approach to studying coral reef fish dispersal. I also worked on the evolutionary demography of maternal effect senescence, a particular class of maternal effects that we studied using data from a novel model organism.

From late 2020-2023, I was a postdoctoral associate at Cornell University in the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. In that position, I developed an exact version of Life Table Response Experiments and an R package to go along with it (Video webinar on the package). I also studied the role of ‘luck’ in life histories across the wide variety of plant and animal population models available through the COM(P)ADRE databases. This position was in collaboration with and supervised by Steve Ellner (Cornell), Giles Hooker (Cornell), Robin Snyder (Case Western Reserve), and Peter Adler (Utah State).