Photo: Diana Macias

I'm an evolutionary ornithologist who uses natural populations to understand how species diverge and evolve. My research pulls from incredible resources available to biologists, such as the natural history collections that act as invaluable archives of biodiversity, to cutting edge genomic methods and population genetic simulations that allow me to understand natural variation. I interested in speciation at many levels, spanning the genomic processes that drive it, the ecological factors that facilitate it, and the geographic patterns that influence it. I mostly work on island systems, which provide a natural laboratory to study how populations diverge in geographic allopatry. I also work in terrestrial systems that help allow local fieldwork and training the next generation of biologists.

I am currently an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow based at Texas Tech University, where I am co-sponsored by Dr. Joe Manthey (Texas Tech) and Dr. Philipp Messer (Cornell). I completed my Ph.D with Dr. Mike Andersen at the University of New Mexico and Museum of Southwestern Biology, where I am currently a research associate.

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