Postdoctoral Research Associate, 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. My position is funded by a NERC “Pushing the Frontiers” grant led by Rob Salguero-G'omez with co-investigators Iain Stott (Univ. of Lincoln) and Andy Hector (Oxford). This project will to build on previous work on population resilience, expanding our understanding of resilience to more realistic populations, disturbance regimes, and making connections 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). This work was in collaboration with and supervised by Steve Ellner (Cornell), Giles Hooker (Cornell), Robin Snyder (Case Western Reserve), and Peter Adler (Utah State).