I am interested in the stories of idiosyncratic non-model lineages as a means to understand broader evolutionary trends and constraints — particularly at the level of cell structures, cellular compartments, and intracellular processes.

An elegant union of evolution and cell biology can be found in endosymbiosis: broadly, a cell or cells (endosymbionts) living stably inside of a different cell (the host cell). The endosymbionts are often bacteria, and the host cell is virtually always a eukaryote. Despite their biochemical differences, the host and its endosymbionts can become highly integrated through evolutionary time. Some parts of this process, such as gene loss and genome reduction in certain bacterial endosymbionts, are highly recurrent. Others may be more variable, depending on the particulars of each organism's evolutionary history.

My research so far is principally concerned with bacterial endosymbionts of insects. Beginning in 2017, I worked on tsetse fly symbionts with Dr. Rita Rio at West Virginia University. Shortly after earning my B.S. from WVU in 2021, I joined my current advisor John McCutcheon's lab as an Evolutionary Biology PhD student at Arizona State University, where I study endosymbionts of cicadas.

I do a disservice to each of my personal interests by stretching my time across too many of them. I enjoy reading, blogging, birding, tasting pu'erh tea, discovering new and obscure music, practicing yoga, and playing softball, to name a few. I am a user and sometime evangelist of GNU/Linux and other free software.