News
I won the Warder Clyde Allee Award at the 2026 Animal Behavior Society conference in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Our work on superb starlings was featured in Ranger Rick kid’s magazine.
The New York Times covered our work on reciprocal helping.
Our new paper on the factors driving helping behavior in cooperative breeders that live with a mix of both kin and non-kin was covered by Living Bird Magazine.
I presented my doctoral dissertation work to the E3B department at Columbia University in a public exit seminar. So nice to visit and celebrate with everyone!
I was awarded an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology to work in the Hein Lab within the Computational Biology department at Cornell University studying how individual heterogeneity and behavioral diversity influence the collective foraging and group-living behavior of brown chromis (Azurina multilineata) in Curaçao and how changes in their social group composition impact reef ecosystem health (more on the NSF website).
We analyzed >12,000 helping observations involving 563 helpers at 410 nests across 9 social groups over 40 breeding seasons spanning 20 years and found remarkable evidence that superb starlings maintain reciprocal relationships by swapping breeder and helper roles with preferred (kin and non-kin) social partners across years. Read the paper.
I successfully defended my PhD thesis in the E3B department at Columbia University! I am grateful to my advisor (Dr. Dustin Rubenstein), my committee (especially Dr. Gerry Carter), my wonderful lab mates, my cohort, and the friends and family who supported me throughout this journey.