About Me

My parents always tell me that my first words were, in order: "Mama, Dinosaur, Dada".

I have been fascinated by paleontology and the natural sciences for my entire life. For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to learn about the ways Earth and its organisms have changed through time and understand the implications that the past may hold for the present and the future. One of my earliest memories as a child was finding a large bone in the backyard of my childhood home in Pennsylvania, and taking it to the Academy of Natural Sciences to be identified by paleontologists (it turns out it wasn't actually a fossil, but still a several-hundred year old cow bone!). And while I could never fully understand how that bone came to be in my backyard, it got me wondering about what types of organisms used to live there, how that place had changed over time, and how it might continue to change in the future. And those are the same questions that inspire and motivate me today.

One of my mentors at the University of Pittsburgh, Abby West, once told me that life on Earth has been one long, single-trial experiment, and it's up to paleontologists to collect the data and interpret the results. Especially in light of ongoing global climate change, I believe that understanding the results of this eons-long experiment is more important now than ever before.

As an undergraduate at the University of Pittsburgh, I focused my studies on Biology, Anthropology, and Chemistry so that I could become comfortable with the scientific and methodological foundations of paleontology. I worked on various projects at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and the New Jersey State Museum, familiarizing myself with the fossils of a variety of taxa and learning how conduct research in a museum-based setting. Most of my undergraduate research focused on the Late Cretaceous fossils from the Brooks of Monmouth County, New Jersey. These sites are famous for producing an ABUNDANCE of marine vertebrate fossils, and I sought to increase our understanding of the ecosystem these extinct animals lived in and use this unique study system to better understand the ways we can measure biodiversity in the deep past. While in Pittsburgh, I was also an undergraduate and post-baccalaureate researcher in the Turcotte Lab of Experimental Evolutionary Ecology, where I conducted various experiments studying the effects of biological invasion and predation on native species survival and evolution. Now, as a PhD student in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Kansas, I work with Dr. K. Christopher Beard to study Paleogene terrestrial vertebrates and untangle the effects of global climate change on their evolution. (Learn more about my ongoing research projects here!)

A Cretaceous-aged mackerel shark tooth from New Jersey

I feel extremely fortunate to have had a number of incredible teachers and mentors who pushed me to pursue my passion and helped me to navigate my own academic journey. As such, I am interested in doing all I can to pay their efforts forward and help others to achieve their own goals, and I am passionate about teaching, public outreach, and undergraduate mentoring. (Learn more about my teaching experience, outreach projects, and mentoring efforts here!)

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