Research

How do social organisms organize effective defenses against different ecological threats? My research uses the European paper wasp (Polistes dominula) to investigate how collective defense strategies emerge in societies without morphologically specialized defenders. By combining controlled behavioral experiments with ecological and evolutionary perspectives, I examine how colonies adjust their responses to different enemies and how consistent individual differences contribute to defensive division of labor. Ultimately, this work seeks to understand how ecological interactions shape the evolution and organization of collective defense.

What mechanisms give rise to these defensive phenotypes? To address this question, I integrate behavioral assays with transcriptomic and molecular approaches to identify the genes and pathways associated with defensive specialization and behavioral plasticity. By linking molecular variation to individual phenotypes, I investigate how gene regulation contributes to consistent differences in defense and the emergnece of collective defense strategies.

California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, Department of Biological Sciences

As an undergraduate and master's student in Dr. Nikki Adams' lab at Cal Poly's Center for Coastal Marine Sciences, I investigated how maternal investment contributes to differences in UV-tolerance of intertidal and subtidal populations of purple sea urchins (Strongylocentrotus purpuratus). Using proteomic and developmental biology approaches, I examined differences in maternally provisioned proteins between intertidal and subtidal populations to understand how mothers influence embryonic tolerance to UV radiation. This work identified candidate proteins involved in cellular stress responses and provided insight into the molecular mechanisms that may facilitate adaptation to challanging environmental conditions.