Biography


After growing up in Davis, California, I enrolled in Princeton University to run on the cross country team and study in the Ecology & Evolutionary Biology department. After an unfortunate spell of injuries, I left the cross country team and spent a semester at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama as part of Princeton’s Tropical Biology Program. There, I became interested in tropical ecology while sampling arthropods and corals in the forests and reefs of Panama. I also participated on a project led by Martin Wikelski on Barro Colorado Island, where I used radio telemetry to examine the influence of army ant swarm movements on antbirds.

During my summers in college, I worked as a U.S. Forest Service wilderness ranger and patrolled backcountry trails in the Sierra Nevada. On my days off, I accompanied John Wehausen in the Southern Sierra while he surveyed the endangered Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep. For my senior thesis, I examined Dr. Wehausen’s hypothesis that apparent competition involving hyperabundant mule deer populations caused mountain lions, a native predator, to threaten the bighorn sheep through range alteration. I compared this situation to a similar case in the northern Channel Islands, where the endemic island fox was threated by direct predation from golden eagles, which were sustained by large populations of non-native ungulates.

After college, I spent a year in northeast Thailand where I studied the behavioral ecology of Phayre’s leaf monkeys. I examined the influence of neighboring groups and habitat edges on range movement, and found the monkeys preferred core areas of their home ranges. Intriguingly, at their range boundaries, the monkeys preferred habitat edges, where increased sunlight may have led to increased resource quality and where conspecific competitors were absent.

During a break from my research in Thailand, I visited a large reservoir that flooded a forest valley in the late 1980s, a former field site of my current advisor. In the 1990s, his students compared small mammal communities on the forest islands isolated by the reservoir and in forest patches adjacent to the reservoir. I first met David Woodruff on the streets of Bangkok in July 2006 and entered his lab in September 2007.

Before beginning graduate school, I worked on San Clemente Island off the coast of San Diego, where I monitored black rat populations and evaluated the population control measures being implemented to protect the critically endangered San Clemente loggerhead shrike. I moved into an apartment in Del Mar in the spring of 2007, and began my Ph.D. program that fall.

While living in San Diego, I enjoy surfing in front of my apartment and hiking in the nearby mountains and desert. I'm beginning to run again and hope to compete in local 5Ks and half marathons. Life is good!