Variation in aquatic enviroments is a huge influence on the organisms that live there. I seek to understand how spatial and temporal variation in things like flow, connectivity, and biological interactions influence the abundance and distribution of aquatic species, especially fishes. 

In California's bar-built estuaries, the seasonality of rainfall leads to a cycle where estuary mouths are closed off from the ocean by a sandbar, and then that sandbar is breached during winter rains. This cycle is the backdrop for all ecological interactions. Bar-built estuaries are an excellent study system for asking about the impacts of variation because not only do they have this dynamic cycle, but estuary cycles vary dramatically from one another - along climate gradients from the wet north to the dry south, but also depending on local factors such as drainage area.

I study how environments shape the organisms that live in them. I've worked on the selective effects of predators in stickleback and guppies. I showed how guppy foraging morphology and behavior were correlated under high- and low-predation guppy populations. In California, I showed that predator presence was associated with armor trait variation in stickleback even in the presence of widespread gene flow. 

I also seek to apply selectivity analysis to novel situations. For example, I collaborated with researchers at the USGS to describe the selectivity of fish passage through culverts. In an experiment, fish with a more streamlined body shape were more likely to attempt pasasge, but given that they made an attempt, not much more likely to succeed. Model selection showed that body shape was included in the top model alongside more traditionally studied predictors such as flow.

I'm interested in how selection and gene flow interaction in complex landscapes, such as the meta-community of bar-built estuaries in California. I'm especially worried about whether selection and gene flow will be able to help species adapt to a changing climate, or whether their interactions across the landscape might prevent adaptive alleles from migrating where they need to go. I'm following up on my stickleback work by quantifying the effects of climate on estuary breaching and gene flow. I'm also working with Mark Urban in a model system (Daphnia) to understand how gene flow interacts with selection from multiple sources. We're interested in testing whether assisted migration can be used to improve adaptation to changing climates even in the face of selection from other factors.

Teacher attrition is at a crisis point. We've been losing teachers for years, and the effects of the pandemic have caused many more teachers to leave the profession. Yet work on what causes teachers to leave still focus mainly on personal factors. Along with my postdoc supervisors Robert Bagchi and John Settlage, we take a systems approach to determine which features of schools are correlated with teacher attrition. Borrowing techniques and approaches from ecology we used administrative data to complete a "community ordination" of Connecticut High Schools. We then use this and other predictors in hierarchicial models to show how the school environment influences the probability of teacher retention. We show major differences across school environment and interactions with individual race.  We are hoping to identify factors that help mitigate disparities, for example the presence of teaching coaches seems to help in some contexts but not others.