Updates

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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
May 2021

I'm very excited to say that the fourth publication from my dissertation work is now available here, in early view at The American Naturalist! In this manuscript I provide evidence for character displacement in floral scent in Clarkia.
August 2020

The third publication from my dissertation work is now out in an issue at Evolution! This project was a multi-year study that examines how community context shapes selection on floral traits in Clarkia. You can check out the paper here, and a digest that was written about the paper here.
July 2020

ECR2, an online meeting organized by grad students from ASN, SSE, and SSB, is happening! I've been working on a few of the events as well as overall logistics. The website for the meeting is linked here, and it provides a schedule. Recordings of most events will be available on YouTube (see meeting website) if you missed an event.
April 2020



I defended my Ph.D.! A big thank you to my committee members for their support, and to my friends and family in & out of academia who zoomed into my virtual defense and made it a lot of fun!

I submitted a manuscript that provides evidence for character displacement in floral scent in Clarkia! It's available now on bioRxiv.
March 2020





I received an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology! I'll be working with Magne Friberg and Anna Runemark at Lund University on genomic & ecological factors that contribute to variation in the floral scent of Arabis alpina across Europe.

In early March, before everything shut down, I went on a super fun trip to Philadelphia, where I presented two seminars (the BEES grad seminar at Drexel, and the Academy seminar series at the Natural Academy). I also got to see *the original Clarkia*, the specimen collected on the Lewis and Clark expedition! The note on the type specimen (Clarkia pulchella) says "A beautiful herbaceous plant" --agree!
January 2020

I presented at the American Society of Naturalists Stand-Alone Meeting in Asilomar! It was my second time at this meeting and it was great to see friends and walk down to the beach in between great talks.
November 2019

The second publication from my dissertation is out in a special issue on floral trait evolution in the International Journal of Plant Sciences! This paper documents the results of a huge flowering time manipulation study that I performed in Kern County in 2016. The full text is available here.
August 2019

I joined the American Society of Naturalists Graduate Council. Looking forward to getting more involved in the society and working on initiatives to promote diversity & inclusion through the ASN Diversity Committee.
June-July 2019

I went to two amazing meetings back to back: Evolution in Providence, RI and the 43rd New Phytologist Symposium, which was centered around species interactions and trait evolution and took place in Zurich, Switzerland. In addition to all of the great science, I loved seeing the species-rich plant communities of the Swiss Alps--can't wait to get back there!
January 2019




I'm excited to be a TA for Chemical Ecology this semester! Looking forward to getting students curious about the roles that chemistry plays in many systems, from plants & insects to marine inverts! I'll be giving a guest lecture on the chemical ecology of invasive species, as part of the final segment of the course, Chemical Ecology in the Anthropocene.

Our meta-analysis of experimental studies of selection on floral traits is out in an issue at Evolution! This has been a long-time collaboration with Chris Caruso (University of Guelph), Ryan Martin (Case Western University), and Nina Sletvold (Uppsala University). You can check out the full text here .
October 2018



The first publication from my dissertation is out in an issue at Journal of Evolutionary Biology. This study uses data from species co-occurrence mapping and a greenhouse common garden to address whether Clarkia communities are shaped by ecological sorting and character displacement. The full text is available here .

I published a digest in Evolution about a recent paper that uses an experimental evolution approach to explore how generalized pollination evolves. You can check it out here.
August 2018

I presented at the joint SSE-ESEB Evolution meeting in Montpellier, France! I enjoyed connecting with the European pollination biology/floral trait evolution community, and of course, many croissants.
May 2018

Headed back to the southern Sierra foothills for a short field project looking at linking variation in flower size to variation in the abiotic environment, plant biomass, and physiology. This was in collaboration with my great friend Ellie Goud, and we had a lot of fun taking soil cores, measuring plants, and soaking in the local flora.
January 2018

I attended the American Society of Naturalists Stand-Alone Meeting (the Asilomar meeting) for the first time! I presented on my multi-year selection study and won an award for the best talk by a grad student. I am already looking forward to the next Asilomar meeting!