Assistant Professor
3128 East Science Hall, Science & Engineering Complex
(205) 934-8335
Research and Teaching Interests: Evolution, Genomics, Biology of Aging, Evolutionary Medicine, Animal Behavior, Bioinformatics
Office Hours: By appointment
Education:
- B.A., New York University, Anthropology
- M.A., Washington University in St. Louis, Physical Anthropology
- Ph.D., Washington University in St. Louis, Physical Anthropology
My research centers on the intersection of sociality, ecology, genomics, and health in primates. I grew up in New Jersey and had a watershed moment when I first discovered primatology and genetic research as an undergraduate in New York City. Since then, my research has taken me across the continental United States and to primate field sites around the world, including sites in Puerto Rico, Ecuador, Ethiopia, and Zambia.
I am interested in the biological and evolutionary underpinnings of health and aging, focusing on two main questions:
- how social experiences and other environmental stimuli may influence health disparities by altering physiology, physiology, and aging.
- how genome evolution shaped by population dynamics and natural selection influences physiology and health.
My research is collaborative and multidisciplinary, blending evolutionary biology, biological anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, geroscience, and genomics. My research also combines insights from field-based observations, laboratory-based experiments, and computational analysis. My work therefore takes us along the full gamut from fieldwork to labwork to the computational work necessary for making sense of complex and highly dimensional data.
