Research
I draw on experience as a researcher that’s worked on wildlife biology, the biomechanics of flight, and carbon sequestration. These projects taught me a lot, including finding the right questions, working with data, and how to make complicated concepts straightforward.
I started here
researching the biomechanics of arboreal ants at Barro Colorado Island in Panama, as an undergrad.
After graduating from Cal, I spent a summer in Malaysian logging camp as a field assistant for the Potts Lab.
We worked out of a logging camp in Perak, near the border with Thailand.
We worked on a lot of studies, but the main focus was collecting soil samples. That meant I spent a lot of time hiking with a backpack full of dirt!
The overall goal was to contextualize tropical deforestation’s effect on soil carbon sequestration and climate change.
A few years later, I joined the Altshuler Lab to research the biomechanics of hummingbird flight
Circular thinking
My master’s thesis focused on discovering how hummingbirds move their wings to turn. To accomplish this filmed hummingbirds with high-speed cameras and reconstructed their movements.
Turns out, instead of having one set of kinematics to make centripetal force, hummingbirds have a set to control how tight a turn is and another for how fast it is.
High flying
I also researched how elevation affects flight by filming birds in a chamber where we could adjust the density and oxygen levels. For hummingbirds, we found that changes in air density made a much bigger impact on their agility than changes in oxygen.