Interested in joining the lab?
Prospective Postdocs:
I am always interested in hearing from prospective postdocs who may be interested in working with our group! Support for postdocs in my group comes from a variety of sources, including especially from the many Smithsonian Fellowship Programs. Prospective postdocs are strongly encouraged to reach out to me early in the process of considering applying to the Smithsonian. In your email, please include a current CV and a brief description of your career goals, research interests, and any ideas for the work you'd like to do in our group.
Prospective Students:
The Smithsonian is not a degree-granting institution. Thus, students cannot be directly enrolled here. However, I am able to support graduate student through a variety of mechanisms, including: co-advising with colleagues at academic institutions, committee membership, and/or shorter-term fellowships. If you are interested in doing graduate work with me, reach out to me early (even if you have not identified an academic partner - I may be able to help with that!). In your email, please include a current CV and a brief description of your career goals, research interests, and any ideas for the work you'd like to do in our group.
I am always interested in hearing from prospective postdocs who may be interested in working with our group! Support for postdocs in my group comes from a variety of sources, including especially from the many Smithsonian Fellowship Programs. Prospective postdocs are strongly encouraged to reach out to me early in the process of considering applying to the Smithsonian. In your email, please include a current CV and a brief description of your career goals, research interests, and any ideas for the work you'd like to do in our group.
Prospective Students:
The Smithsonian is not a degree-granting institution. Thus, students cannot be directly enrolled here. However, I am able to support graduate student through a variety of mechanisms, including: co-advising with colleagues at academic institutions, committee membership, and/or shorter-term fellowships. If you are interested in doing graduate work with me, reach out to me early (even if you have not identified an academic partner - I may be able to help with that!). In your email, please include a current CV and a brief description of your career goals, research interests, and any ideas for the work you'd like to do in our group.
Mentoring Philosophy and Supporting Equitable Science
Students and trainees, both inside and outside the classroom, bring diverse backgrounds, skills, interests, and goals, requiring educators and mentors to take an individualized approach. Therefore, student-centered and evidence-based practices sit at the core of my teaching and mentoring philosophy - both as a matter of pedagogy and accessibility.
The diversity of tools I employ in my research creates many avenues for trainee engagement in research under my mentorship. I prioritize individualized approaches and use the trainees’s goals to co-develop objectives and use backwards design principles to outline activities to facilitate progress towards those goals. I am particularly committed to building and supporting a multi-leveled lab that includes researchers spanning career stages. My lab can support projects in both basic and applied research, but would engage with the major themes of my research such as identifying anthropogenic impacts on animal behavior and movement, elucidating the mechanistic basis for the regulation of populations, and exploring the eco-evolutionary basis of seasonal migration.
Our work also lends itself to supporting students pursuing jobs in private industry or government in addition to those seeking more traditional academic careers. My experience mentoring students spans both academic and professional contexts. I owned and operated an environmental consulting company for over ten years. As such I have unique insights into a diversity of career paths in ecology and have provided formal mentoring to students pursuing the full gamut of possible academic careers.
Finally, work in my lab actively engages with the pervasive and systemic inequities in ecology and evolutionary biology. I aim to reduce barriers to participation and success across multiple axes of marginalized identities including socioeconomic, racial, cultural, gender, sexual orientation, and disability status and am committed to maintaining a vibrant lab group that is respectful, empathetic, accepting, and accessible so that our work together can be excellent and impactful.
The diversity of tools I employ in my research creates many avenues for trainee engagement in research under my mentorship. I prioritize individualized approaches and use the trainees’s goals to co-develop objectives and use backwards design principles to outline activities to facilitate progress towards those goals. I am particularly committed to building and supporting a multi-leveled lab that includes researchers spanning career stages. My lab can support projects in both basic and applied research, but would engage with the major themes of my research such as identifying anthropogenic impacts on animal behavior and movement, elucidating the mechanistic basis for the regulation of populations, and exploring the eco-evolutionary basis of seasonal migration.
Our work also lends itself to supporting students pursuing jobs in private industry or government in addition to those seeking more traditional academic careers. My experience mentoring students spans both academic and professional contexts. I owned and operated an environmental consulting company for over ten years. As such I have unique insights into a diversity of career paths in ecology and have provided formal mentoring to students pursuing the full gamut of possible academic careers.
Finally, work in my lab actively engages with the pervasive and systemic inequities in ecology and evolutionary biology. I aim to reduce barriers to participation and success across multiple axes of marginalized identities including socioeconomic, racial, cultural, gender, sexual orientation, and disability status and am committed to maintaining a vibrant lab group that is respectful, empathetic, accepting, and accessible so that our work together can be excellent and impactful.