Bio

Long Story (not so) Short…

I grew up in middle Tennessee and spent a lot of time running around the woods. I wanted to learn more about the natural world around me, which eventually landed me in the Biology program at East Tennessee State University. There I was fortunate to cross paths with Thomas Jones (TJ), who fatefully asked me what I’d like to do with my life. That conversation culminated in a crash-course on the behavioral ecology of arachnids, including some work as an undergraduate research assistant studying the foraging behavior of social spiders.

I stuck around the Jones Lab for a master’s degree, where I focused on how predation risk and prey abundance shape the evolution of daily rhythms of behavior. During this time I became increasingly interested in how the evolution of animal behavior affects population-level processes (particularly reproductive isolation and speciation). This is also when I was first introduced to mathematical models in ecology and evolutionary biology, and I got the bug bad.

I wanted use empirical work and my newfound fondness for theory to expand my research to not only consider behavior per se, but also how population-level processes depend on individuals’ behaviors. This led me to Eileen Hebets and Brigitte Tenhumberg’s labs at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where I primarily studied the evolution of mate choice behaviors and their consequences for intraspecific divergence in sexual traits in Schizocosa wolf spiders.

After my PhD, I did a short postdoc with John DeLong and Clay Cressler at the University of Nebraska in which I developed eco-evolutionary models to study the effect of evolution on unstable coexistence in ecological communities. In my current postdoc with Courtney Fitzpatrick at Texas A&M, I use population genetic models to study the evolution of female signals through social benefits.

Fun Stuff

When I’m not in the lab, you’ll often find me hiking with my wife, Cecile, and our dog, Yuki, or enjoying the company of our cat, the girl who has no name. I love music, so we almost always have a record playing at our house. I also enjoy making music with friends and skateboarding when my aging back allows.

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