Education:

         PhD Cornell University, Behavioral Biology
         BS UC San Diego, Ecology, Behavior and Evolution.

Teaches:

        Fundamental Animal Behavior,  Special Study,  Agricultural Entomology & Bees

Research Interests:

         I am broadly interested in Animal Behavior, Evolution, Theoretical Biology, and Genomics. To date, my research has used a combination of experiments, simulation models, and computational biology to explore the evolution of advanced sociality, mechanisms of social organization, and self-organization. Chief amongst my results are that novel genes (orphans) are important for eusocial evolution and task allocation can work via a self organizing coupled localization diffusion process. I have also shown that colony fitness is often maximized when selection couples self-organization with other mechanisms, such as templates and recipes. In addition, I have written forward thinking conceptual syntheses on the evolution of the superorganism phenotype and division of labor. These syntheses present integrative biology perspectives on eusocial evolution and propose novel hypotheses, which I plan to make the subject of my future work.