about me

disease ecology, ecosystem health and conservation biology, data science

Broadly, I am interested in how feedbacks between ecological and evolutionary processes can vary the impacts of emerging infectious disease across biological levels of organization as well as the effect of seasonality on host-pathogen dynamics. The primary motivation of my research is to inform management and intervention decisions in wildlife disease systems by leveraging cross-disciplinary efforts and ecological understanding. Combining field-based investigations with large, public datasets, I have explored how species' life histories, environmentally dependent trait expression, and demography can influence patterns of disease and population dynamics.

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I am currently a Postdoc with the Carver Research Group at the University of Georgia. I completed my PhD in the Langwig Lab at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University where I worked on bats affected by white-nose syndrome, an emerging fungal disease that caused severe population declines across North America. My dissertation focused on the drivers and population-level consequences of sex-biased infections in collaboration with state and federal scientists and academics across multiple institutions. I have also worked within field systems to examine shifting adaptive traits with disease phase and exposure of wildlife communities to SARS CoV-2.