I teach organismal biology courses, mentor students and conduct primary research on vertebrate behavior. As an integrative biologist I am interested in understanding how animals conduct their lives in their intimate natural environments. My students and I investigate how hormones and the brain generate variation in behavior and we connect this variation to fitness consequences in the wild. We are currently focused on understanding the mechanistic basis for differences within- and among-individuals. We study variation and covariation at these two levels and use sexual behavior, coping behavior and (neuro)endocrine traits as the phenotypic characters of interest. Wild songbirds and frogs serve as our study systems.
When I’m not in the lab or outdoors, you can find me experimenting in my kitchen.