During my undergraduate studies at Colorado State University, I worked as a laboratory technician in Dr. Chris Funk’s lab. As part of a large, collaborative project testing relative risks of climate change on temperature versus tropical species, I worked with PhD student Brian Gill to DNA barcode aquatic insects from the Colorado Rocky Mountains and the Ecuadorian Andes, thus creating high resolution taxonomic units for biogeographic comparisons. However, my interests truly lie in plant evolutionary ecology. In the Jones lab, my PhD work will be focused on population genetics of the tropical understory herb, Heliconia tortuosa, in the face of habitat fragmentation. Additionally, we hope to study the unique system of pollination biology and coevolution between long-billed hummingbirds and Heliconia.
