Overview
I am an evolutionary biologist interested in how and why animals communicate, how communication systems evolve, and how animals use behavior to navigate a rapidly changing world. Birdsong is a central focus of my work, offering an unusual opportunity to combine experiments on individual behavior with historical recordings, genomic resources, and comparative data to understand how communication evolves and responds to environmental change.
My research integrates field and laboratory experiments, comparative phylogenetics, and analyses of historical and contemporary natural history media. Across these approaches, I am interested in behavior both as a driver of evolutionary processes and as a sensitive indicator of environmental change. Increasingly, I am also interested in how large natural history collections and computational approaches can allow us to study behavior at scales that have historically been difficult to reach while remaining grounded in the behavior of individuals.
Research Focus
Evolution of animal communication. Why do animals communicate the way they do, and what generates the extraordinary diversity of communication systems we see across species? We study how signals arise and diversify due to learning, morphology, ecology, sensory processes, and the social and physical environment. Birdsong provides an especially rich system for asking these questions because songs are simultaneously biological and cultural traits: they are shaped by natural selection but also learned and transmitted among individuals. By combining detailed studies of signal variation with comparative and phylogenetic approaches, we test how processes acting within and among individuals scale up to shape communication across populations, species, and evolutionary time.
Behavior in changing environments. Behavior is often an animal's first response to environmental change. Our work asks when behavioral flexibility allows animals to cope with new conditions, when environmental change constrains behavior, and what those responses mean for survival and reproduction. We have studied how birds respond to urban noise, changing soundscapes, and extreme heat, integrating historical recordings and field experiments with physiological, genomic, and neurobiological measures. This work uses animal behavior both to understand mechanisms of resilience and vulnerability and to reveal ecological change that might otherwise be difficult to detect.
Behavior across scales. A central goal of my work is to understand how processes occurring within and among individuals generate patterns across populations, species, and evolutionary time. At Cornell, I am expanding this work by pairing the Macaulay Library's extraordinary depth of natural history media with comparative datasets and emerging computational and AI approaches. These resources create opportunities to study communication and other behaviors across species, geography, and time while connecting large-scale patterns back to the individual-level processes that generate them.
