About Me
I am a professor and researcher interested in how animals interact with their environment using sensory systems and how their systems have adapted to their environment, diet, and/or behavior. I am also passionate about collaborating across disciplines to take basic research to applied sciences and use information about sensory morphology for bio-technological applications.
I specialize in aquatic vertebrates but I like to say that if it can touch, taste, smell, hear, or see then I want to study it.
At Texas A&M, I used seal whiskers to investigate the relationship between innervation patterns and seal behavior, as well as using whiskers as living documentation of hormones related to stress and reproduction. At University of Rhode Island, I turned my focus towards fishes and their lateral line system. I investigated how this sensory system develops in freshwater fishes and how changes to development can impact this system. I looked at this through the lens of climate change and evolution, looking at how climate change affects the development and ultimately the adult condition of the lateral line system and how changes in developmental timing among species of minnows results in the evolution of adaptive phenotypes.