I am currently a graduate student in Dr. Ellen Damschen's lab at Washington University in St. Louis. Broadly, my interests lie in community and restoration ecology and in developing techniques to successfully restore communities. For my dissertation I am working to understand how corridors alter rates of pre-dispersal seed predation and what effects this plant-animal interaction has on population growth and spread for native species in the region. I earned my Bachelor of Science in Biology from the University of Washington in Seattle. I have had diverse undergraduate and post-Bachelor's degree research experiences, including work with marine, avian, and plant systems. I was also able to work extensively on one research project investigating the evolutionary ecology of capsaicin, the secondary metabolite responsible for the chili pepper's heat. My undergraduarte research primarily focused on seed predation of pre- and post-dispersed Capsicum chacoense in the Bolivian Chaco. |
