People often ask me how I got started in my research area.  To best understand my interests and what I study it is easiest to start at the beginning!  After I completed my BS in Biology at California Polytechnic State Univeristy, I began my research career at, of all places, Moss Landing Marine Laboratories (yes, that's where I find myself now!). There, among other things, I studied the feeding ecology of marine fishes with Dr. Greg Cailliet. One of the most interesting observations that I made during my Master's Thesis research was that the very sluggish-appearing deep-sea fish that I was studying ate fast and highly maneuverable prey items. This seemed to defy all that I had learned about how predator-prey systems are supposed to exist.

Armed with this observation, I came to Dr. George Lauder and the Comparative Physiology Group in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at U.C. Irvine with the goal of understanding how fish ate (George is now at Harvard).  That is to say, given that an organism possesses a certain feeding morphology, just what range of prey capture behaviors (kinematics) is it capable of performing with that morphology?  Quantifying this range of behavioral variation for one morphological model, the shark jaw, was the goal of my dissertation research and has led to subsequent studies of ventilatory mechanics, and to a variety of projects where we are attempting to develop better metrics for quantifying feeding performance. 

I continued to examine both variation in feeding behavior (in wrasses) and techniques for quantifying and understanding feeding performance (current collaborations, see also CV) as part of my post-doctoral research with Dr. Peter Wainwright (Center for Population Biology, U.C. Davis).  However, my interests also led me to the study of variation in morphology and the role evolutionary novelty.   Additional post-doctoral studies focused on some very different kinds of morphological innovations and their roles in dietary specialization; the pharyngeal jaws of wrasses and their allies, and the elongate jaws of tropical marine butterflyfishes.

The unifying theme to my current and future research directions is to more generally to quantify the differences in morphological, physiological, and behavioral (kinematic) traits in organisms, to understand the evolutionary origin of such traits, and to determine the consequence of variation in such traits for organisms and their ecological interactions.  I do this by bringing together the unique qualities and strengths of my diverse areas of education.  During my own Master Thesis’s research I was trained as a Marine Ecologist.  My PhD focused largely on Functional Morphology placed within the framework of Comparative Organismal Physiology.  Functional Morphologists attempt to answer the fundamental question “how does it work?”  Comparative and Evolutionary Biologists often go one step further and are able to ask “how has it come to be that way?”  I often find myself returning to the ideas that were central to my experience as an Ecologist and also asking “to what end?”  As my interests sit squarely at the intersection of these fields of research, I am attempting to bring together the technology of functional morphologist, the forethought of the evolutionary biologist, and the perspective of the ecologist that looks beyond the single organism or species.