I am an early career researcher, focusing on behavioral ecology, demography, wildlife conservation, and citizen science.
I am currently a postdoc at the University of Amsterdam, working with Dr. Emiel van Loon to understand how individual behavior influences demography in invasive muskrats, coypu, and brown rats. The project aims to discover the impacts of these invasive species on biodiversity throughout the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany.
I recently finished a postdoc in Prof. Barbara König’s group at the University of Zurich, working to understand the consequences of social interactions in free-living female house mice. My research included four separate studies to understand 1) whether sociality affects reproductive timing, 2) how communal nursing impacts the gut microbes of both pups and adults, 3) whether social group size influences demographic parameters, and 4) a comparison of the accuracy of methodologies used to count abundance in wild animals.
Before arriving in Zurich, I was a postdoc at the University of Cambridge, working with Dr. Michelle Henley at the non-profit Elephants Alive in South Africa. During the postdoc, I created a method to non-invasively record tusk size, body size, age, and musth from survey photographs of African elephants. I continue to collaborate with Elephants Alive on a project that compares the accuracy of different aging techniques.
I also specialize in methods using camera traps, survey photographs, and citizen science. During my PhD at the University of Oxford, I was one of the lead scientists in the creation of the citizen-science website Penguin Watch, which has engaged over 50,000 registered volunteers in the annotation of over 700,000 images of nesting penguins throughout the Southern Ocean.
