Over the course of my scientific career, I have enjoyed working with diverse taxa - from Sea Turtles in the Caribbean to the Salamanders on my very own undergraduate college campus - but my heart truly lies with Phylum Arthropoda.

 

Arthropods are by far the most diverse and speciose taxonomic group of all animals and as such, represent a fantastic array of evolutionary, developmental, and physiological processes to unravel.

 

From the exaggerated horns on male Rhinoceros beetles to the complex life history trade-off of wing polyphenic development in crickets, my work has primarily focused on understanding complex or unusual arthropod phenotypes in an Eco-Evo-Devo context.

 

Disentangling the relative contributions of genetics, development, and ecological context to exaggerated arthropod phenotypes is a nearly boundless research topic that I look forward to exploring for the rest of my life.

 

In my current role as a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Connecticut my research aims to assess the evolution of insect wings using diverse model taxa and both bioinformatic and functional genomic approaches.