I am a graduate student studying invasive species at the global scale. I am interested in current and historic patterns of species invasion, and am developing workflows to link citizen science invasive occurrence datasets with global invasive species bioinformatics efforts. I am particularly interested in the environmental niches of invasive species and their temporal dynamics: a strong understanding of short and long timescale niche dynamics is critical for accurate predictions of future invasive species range expansion and impact, and efficient allocation of conservation resources.
Before Yale, I completed my undergraduate degree in environmental biology at Columbia University. I studied New York City pigeons for my senior thesis, exploring the responses of pigeons to urbanization using flight initiation distances that I collected. Since coming to Yale, I have worked as a research associate with Map of Life, helping to curate varied biodiversity datasets. I have also worked on STOAT (https://mol.org/stoat/), a tool for the environmental annotation of biodiversity data, as both a developer and a tester.
Out of the lab, I am a passionate (but sometimes not-so-skillful) birdwatcher, with my preferred habitat being the sometimes dirty but always lively parks of New York City. I am an avid urban explorer, and enjoy long walks in the city to strange destinations, staring at weeds on the sidewalk along the way while passersby give me weird looks.