I am an ecological and evolutionary geneticist and study resilience to environmental stress. I am interested in how organisms can transition and adapt across environmental gradients and in thinking about how we can understand the potential for resilience and adaptation to human driven global change. I use a combination of field collections, lab experiments, experimental evolution, and various genomic approaches to answer these questions. I find it particularly important to integrate across fields and approaches in order to understand the complexities of natural systems and to apply our knowledge to organisms of conservation concern. Further descriptions of my research focus can be found on the research page.
In my current position I am a research scientist in the Marine Mammal and Turtle Division at Southeast Fisheries Science Center. Prior to this I was a junior professor (equivalent to assistant professor) at GEOMAR where I lead the Ecological and Evolutionary Genomics Group; I still mentor a few lab members and have ongoing projects at GEOMAR. I was a postdoc at the University of Vermont working with Melissa Pespeni on copepod rapid adaptation and experimental evolution to global change (also working very closely with the Dam Lab at UConn). I did my PhD work on the physiological genomics of killifish local adaptation with Andrew Whitehead at UC Davis.