I’ve been in science for over a decade now, and have had a broad range of experiences that have made me the researcher I am today.

I started doing research by being an intern at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Gamboa, Panama. There, I gained skills as a researcher in the lab of Dr. Rachel Page, working with Dr. Barrett Klein on a long-term project looking at sleep architecture and behavior in neotropical bats. While I spent summers in the jungles of Panama catching bats and watching them sleep for hours every day, I would spend the rest of my year in the chillier Halifax, Nova Scotia Canada where I received my BSc at Dalhousie University and the University of Kings College in both Biology and Early Modern Studies.

After undergrad, I wanted to continue studying bats, but I also wanted to dive deeper into the underlying mechanisms that might explain some of the behaviors I could see in the field. I joined the lab of Dr. Cynthia Moss at Johns Hopkins University, where I got my PhD in Psychological and Brain Sciences. There, I dove into a new world of computational and electrophysiological approaches to understanding behavior.

Currently, I’m a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Dr. Bruce Carlson  at Washington University in St. Louis. I have shifted active sensing animal models from the sound-centric echolocating bats to mormyrid weakly electric fish. I am fascinated by how some animals can not only use other sensory modalities to interact with their worlds, but can actively adjust aspects of outgoing specialized signals to contend with the noisy and complicated world we all deal with daily.