Research
Research Interests
Understanding how an individual's behaviors link to population-level dynamics, especially in light of conservation concerns, has shaped my research interests. I am very interested in social behavior, its causes and repercussions. Recently I have been focusing on how movement and space use relate to social behaviors, and how these suites of behaviors among individuals influence population-level properties. Using tools such as social network analysis, integrated step selection analyses, and resource selection functions, I am addressing how the movement, space use, and social behavior of individuals relate to and potentially predict demographic dynamics in the population. Specifically, I am studying how these behaviors relate to health and mortality among wolves and caribou. Additionally I am working on projection models to forecast movement and habitat selection into the future to help inform conservation management schemes with the Western Boreal Initiative.
Furthermore, because sociality is widespread among animals, researchers have long tried to study the relationship between individual and group level dynamics and how they relate to individuals’ traits and fitness. Social network analysis allows researchers to examine just these factors in a quantitative way. In many species, there are indications that social networks early in life can have lasting but varying effects on individual’s personality, fitness, and physiological traits during adulthood. These hints have prompted me to address how social networks develop during ontogeny and how juvenile networks influence adult traits. Looking at social networks dynamically over ontogeny provides a strong, quantitative mechanism to inquire whether there are critical periods in social development that could negatively affect adult traits if interrupted. How social networks develop can also shed light on how and why they evolved. I am also exploring how human disturbance affects these social network processes and personality. My research on spotted hyenas in the Masai Mara, Kenya focused on these questions.
Understanding how an individual's behaviors link to population-level dynamics, especially in light of conservation concerns, has shaped my research interests. I am very interested in social behavior, its causes and repercussions. Recently I have been focusing on how movement and space use relate to social behaviors, and how these suites of behaviors among individuals influence population-level properties. Using tools such as social network analysis, integrated step selection analyses, and resource selection functions, I am addressing how the movement, space use, and social behavior of individuals relate to and potentially predict demographic dynamics in the population. Specifically, I am studying how these behaviors relate to health and mortality among wolves and caribou. Additionally I am working on projection models to forecast movement and habitat selection into the future to help inform conservation management schemes with the Western Boreal Initiative.
Furthermore, because sociality is widespread among animals, researchers have long tried to study the relationship between individual and group level dynamics and how they relate to individuals’ traits and fitness. Social network analysis allows researchers to examine just these factors in a quantitative way. In many species, there are indications that social networks early in life can have lasting but varying effects on individual’s personality, fitness, and physiological traits during adulthood. These hints have prompted me to address how social networks develop during ontogeny and how juvenile networks influence adult traits. Looking at social networks dynamically over ontogeny provides a strong, quantitative mechanism to inquire whether there are critical periods in social development that could negatively affect adult traits if interrupted. How social networks develop can also shed light on how and why they evolved. I am also exploring how human disturbance affects these social network processes and personality. My research on spotted hyenas in the Masai Mara, Kenya focused on these questions.
Previous Research
During the summer of 2010, I worked at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory with Drs. Mark Bevelhimer and Glenn Cada to see how fresh water organisms responded to strong magnetic and electromagnetic fields. This work is ongoing and more research needs to be done, but preliminary results showed that fathead minnows may show individually varying responses when exposed to magnets. I was previously at ORNL in the summer of 2009 studying the recycling culture on the ORNL campus with Dr. Susan Michaud. We found, unsurprisingly, that the parts of the campus where environmental and biological scientists worked recycled more than where others like computational and materials scientists did their research. |