Spiders captured my interest from the age of five, when I would spend my free time observing spiders in the garden and in the alleyway by my house, throwing ants into webs to watch their predatory behaviors. I attended North Carolina State University in 2013 where I earned a B.S. in Zoology with a minor in Entomology. I graduated summa cum laude from the Zoology honors program and the Scholars program in 2016. While at NCSU, I studied the affect of urban warming upon spider communities living in street trees. The isolated trees of the city served to introduce me in a miniature fashion to island biology and community ecology. After graduation, I expanded on this research through a Ph.D. under the supervision of Rosemary Gillespie in the Evolab at UC Berkeley. I was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship in 2016 for my work upon the island of Sulawesi, and accepted a Fulbright US Student Research Award in 2019 to conduct extensive field work upon Sulawesi over the year of 2020. Outside of my research, I enjoy making music, cooking, playing rugby and surfing.

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