I am broadly interested in how ecological factors shape animal breeding systems and behaviors. To study these questions, I use a variety of tracking methods to describe the hidden lives of free-living avian species. Previously, my research focused on long-lived seabirds breeding in highly dynamic marine environments and the parental care strategies employed by various species to exist in these habitats. In this work, I used a combination of radio-frequency identification readers, geolocators, and GPS tags to monitor the parental effort of breeding pairs. This research was conducted as part of my PhD dissertation, which I completed in 2021 at the University of California, Davis.
Currently, as a post-doctoral researcher within the Next Level Animal Science Innovation Program, I am working with Marc Naguib, Sjouke Kingma, and Kat Bebbington to develop an automated radio telemetry system to track cooperatively breeding birds in Eswatini.
To find out more about my research, please visit here or the Behavioral Ecology Group’s webpage.
