I have always loved math and science. My focus in high school and early college was in math, physics, and engineering. I switched to studying biology after my first year at Penn State, when my mother bought me an iguana and I found myself more interested in learning about its behavior and physiology than studying engineering. I transferred to Miami University in Ohio, to finish my bachelor's of science in Zoology (just biology with an animal focus).

During my bachelor's, master's and doctorate, I did a lot of research, focusing on animal behavioral ecology, integrating molecular genetic techniques to answer questions about how non-human animals behave and interact with their environment. You can read more below about my research in each of these programs.

For my undergraduate independent research, I learned a lot about primates, and investigated the paternity of a bonobo baby at the Columbus Zoo. I worked closely with three mentors: Dr. Tom Gregg--a Drosophila geneticist, and primatologists Dr. Bill McGrew and Dr. Linda Marchant.

I did two different projects during my Master's program (also at Miami University). For one project, I worked with Dr. Bill McGrew, Dr. Linda Marchant, and Dr. Susan Hoffman to determine the sex of wild Senegalese chimpanzees, by extracting DNA from their feces. During that project, I visited the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, where I learned to extract DNA from fecal samples without contaminating it, and to amplify a gene that allowed us to determine the sex of the chimpanzees from their feces. It was there that I was lucky enough to meet Svante Pääbo, who recently won the Nobel Prize in Medicine!

The second research project I completed in my master's program found that female mice preferred the scents of pairs of males that had been nice to each other over males that had been aggressive with each other. Furthermore, females who mated with males who were aggressive with each other had fewer babies than females that mated with males who were tolerant of each other. This suggested that the levels of aggression in a female's social environment impact her reproductive success.

For my doctorate work, I was privileged to work with Dr. Dave Westneat, a prominent ornithologist and behavioral ecologist. He's the one that first figured out that a lot of bird pairs, that build nests together, cheat on each other! I started out my research investigating the MHC - a set of genes that are involved in the immune system - and its role in mating behavior in house sparrows. I did a lot of that lab work in Dr. Ernie Bailey's lab, since he had expertise with MHC. After pursuing that for awhile, I switched to studying personalities in house sparrows - especially the different styles they have when searching for food.

After I completed my PhD, I won a Post-Doctoral Fellowship from the National Science Foundation, to study with Dr. Esteban Fernandez-Juricic at Purdue University. There, my research centered on individual differences in visual physiology - basically, the questions were about whether different birds see differently because of different cells in their eyes, and were those difference related to their abilities to find food.