Floral diversity is amazing! And this is just visual diversity...
I am an evolutionary ecologist.
I use flowers as a nexus for asking questions in ecology and evolutionary biology across scales of biological organization, from genomics and plant metabolism to community dynamics and large-scale meta-analyses. I’m currently working on the genomic underpinnings and ecological drivers of complex trait variation in an artic-alpine perennial in mountainous areas across Europe with Magne Friberg & Anna Runemark at Lund University. I did my Ph.D. research on the effects of community context on evolution in annual wildflower communities in the southern Sierra Nevada foothills in California with Monica Geber at Cornell University. As a research associate with Chris Caruso at the University of Guelph, I worked on projects investigating the evolution of sexual systems in plants using a perennial herb common in wet meadows in eastern North America.
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July 2022 |
Two exciting updates during this very quiet month here in Lund: we've started running our floral scent samples from the Arabis F2s! Can't wait to crunch through the chromatograms and see what we have. In July I participated in a training (for lack of a better word) with the ASN Diversity Committee facilitated by Krystle Cobrun. Krystle is in a word, amazing, and I highly recommend her for anyone looking for a facilitator to help a group make progress and gain confidence surrounding working on DEI projects. |
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June 2022 |
New paper out in American Journal of Botany here! I worked on this project in between my PhD and postdoc and it's exciting to see it come out. It was also a great experience participating in this special issue at AJB. And earlier this month, I had a great week-long field trip to the French Alps, again based at the Jardin du Lautaret. I visited our established French populations and six new populations to sample trichomes and score herbivory, and I ate just a few baguettes along the way. |
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May 2022 |
Whew, we are finally wrapping up this round of working with our Arabis F1s and F2s in the greenhouse! Since January, we have collected 1,151 scent samples (but who's counting?!), and I flash-froze flowers from over 300 plants to use in an RNA-seq study down the road. Can't wait to find out what these plants have to tell us! |
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April 2022 |
I left the tail-end of our massive greenhouse project behind for a week and escaped to our field sites in central Italy, where I experienced rain, hail, snow, sunshine, and an endless supply of Parmigiano Reggiano. Oh and Arabis! We sampled leaves for trichomes and set up a small herbivore exclusion experiment. It was great to get back into the field, I left with lots of ideas for future projects. |
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January 2022 |
Our Arabis F2s are just starting to flower! Hopefully a good proportion of them will flower and we'll get plenty of data over the next few months. |
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November 2021 |
New paper out in Functional Ecology here! This was something I worked on with my lab at Cornell starting in spring 2020 and that we carried on during lockdown, so it is super exciting to see it come out. |
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August 2021 |
I just got back from a short but sweet trip to the French Alps to check out some populations of Arabis alpina that might be part of our 2022 field campaign. It was awesome to see the plants on the slopes of the Alps at elevations around 2,500 meters, and I had a great time at the lovely Jardin du Lautaret. |
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July 2021 |
Finally, finally starting my postdoc at Lund University! Very excited to be working with Magne Friberg, Anna Runemark, and the rest of the team to try to figure out why there is so much variation in the floral scent of Arabis alpina. Looking forward to learning genomics and transcriptomics and hopefully spending a lot of time in the Alps next field season! In other exciting news, a paper I co-authored from a collaboration that was in the works for a long time is now out in Theoretical Ecology here. We demonstrate how the Price Equation can be used to estimate biodiversity change in communities. |