I recently attended the Anatomy Connected 2026 conference, where I co-organized the symposium "Microanatomy of Color: Novel Discoveries from Hierarchical Scales of Color Production in Feathers" and presented a research poster.

In September, I was invited to give a public lecture to the Yolo Bird Alliance (formerly the Yolo Audubon Society) about one of my favorite topics: how birds produce their spectacular colors. During the presentation, Feathered Palettes: The Science of Bird Colors, I took audiences behind the science of feather coloration, exploring everything from the pigments responsible for the reds and yellows of species like the Northern Flicker to the remarkable structural mechanisms tha

I recently had the pleasure of joining the podcast Birds of a Feather Talk Together for a four-episode series celebrating one of my favorite groups of birds: kingfishers.

I'm trading in the bourbon and derby for the sand and the sea! This month I began a three-year National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology (PRFB) jointly hosted by the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and UCLA. My fellowship explores one of the most overlooked colors in birds: white. Although white feathers appear simple, some are produced by remarkably complex nanostructures that remain poorly understood. Over the next three years, I'

One of the most rewarding broader impacts of my Ph.D. research came in the form of museum outreach. The NSF grant that funded our research on island kingfishers also supported the creation of Kingfishers: Through Air & Water, a temporary exhibit in the Grainger Science Hub at the Field Museum of Natural History. The exhibit highlighted kingfisher evolution, natural history, genomics, and the remarkable adaptations that allow many species to plunge dive for fish. I was fortuna

In August 2024, I joined Dr. Rosana Zenil-Ferguson’s lab at the University of Kentucky as a postdoctoral researcher. I traded the Land of Enchantment for the Bluegrass State, where I worked on developing new methods for studying macroevolution using Bayesian phylogenetic approaches. Before I joined as a postdoctoral scholar, Rosana and I collaborated on implementing the Hidden Geographic State-Dependent Speciation and Extinction (GeoHiSSE) in RevBayes to test macroevolutionar

I defended my dissertation in April 2024! My dissertation focused on the macroevolutionary dynamics of Todiramphus kingfishers, exploring how island biogeography, genomic divergence, and plumage color evolution have shaped one of the most widespread avian radiations in the Indo-Pacific. You can watch my defense here if you're interested. This dissertation represents the culmination of years of lab work, museum research, and collaboration, but it's also just the beginning. I