Welcome!

About me

Hi! I am a behavioral ecologist interested in understanding how animals navigate their social worlds, specifically understanding the flexibility, resilience, and complexity of social behavior. I aim to understand how these social processes could shape conservation outcomes, particularly for species living in dynamic or human‑modified environments.

To better understand how animals may navigate social uncertainty, my PhD work focused on new affiliative relationship formation in monk parakeets, a highly social neotropical parrot. You can read more about my research interests, monk parakeets, and social behavior in conservation in my Research Overview

I love fieldwork, good data visualizations, and learning new analytical tools (even when they make my brain hurt a little). I’m passionate about making behavioral ecology more accessible, whether that’s through teaching, writing, or sharing resources that demystify coding and analysis. Outside of research, I love to bird and to do any type of arts and/or crafts, including sewing, ceramics, and painting.

Check out my blog!

I write about animal sociality, behavior, and conservation, as well as the analytical tools used to study them. I also maintain a growing repository of resources that helped me learn to code in R, complete with notes, curated links, and a few tutorials I’ve created along the way.

Coding is an essential skill for behavioral ecologists (Theobold et al., 2020; Auker & Barthelmess 2020), but if you’re like me, coding is not exactly intuitive and can be overwhelming! I hope to update my blog as I learn, so it can be a helpful resource for anyone at any stage looking to learn analytical skills, particularly for behavioral analyses like social network analysis. Here is a good place to start.

For more info

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