Below are brief write-ups of my recent and current projects. Also see my CV.

Current focus: unsteady winds and insect ecology

Insects have to fly to find food, mates, and suitable habitat. Clearly, flying through turbulent air is more challenging than still air. But what exact challenges do insects flying through turbulence face? How might their behavior change with the weather? What effects might we see on insect communities? These are the sorts of questions I am currently interested in. Mostly this has meant spending lots of time watching insects and planning experiments. More to come!

Oblique Streaktail flying above a flower. Western Honey Bee sitting on a flower.
(Left: An Oblique Streaktail (Allograpta obliqua) hovers. True flies (order Diptera) are important pollinators in addition to bees. Right: A Western Honey Bee (Apis mellifera) sits on some California Buckwheat. These are the most common visitors at my main study site.)

Past projects

Sea star locomotion

This project got me started on biomechanics, and I conducted it at Bowdoin as my senior thesis in physics with the guidance of Amy Johnson, Olaf Ellers, Dale Syphers, and Mary Lou Zeeman. The goal was to figure out why sea stars do synchronize their hundreds of tube feet as they move faster (see Movie 1 of this paper). This culminated in my undergraduate thesis.

Kelp biomechanics

Most of us don’t think about kelp as the pinnacle of natural engineering, but they need to have some crazy material properties in order to survive in the rocky intertidal. I began to really appreciate kelp during my time at the University of Washington Friday Harbor Labs taking Ecological Biomechanics with Emily Carrington and Mark Denny. For my class project I used a materials tester to test the elasticity and fracture mechanics of a few species of kelp from slightly different habitats, and some in different orientations. None of my results were especially notable, but I learned a ton.

Daphnia ecotoxicology

As an undergrad at Bowdoin, I worked in the Rogalski Lab. Here, we used Daphnia water fleas as a system for understanding evolution and plasticity in response to pollution. I am a co-author on two papers that resulted from this work: paper 1, paper 2.

daphniamagna
(Above: A photo of one of our Daphnia ambigua that I took through a microscope.)