I am currently a graduate student in the Statistics Department at Penn State University. While my background is in Biology and Wildlife Science, I am very excited at this shift of field and the collaborative opportunities at Penn State. I am interested in exploring the statistical applications to ecological problems and am undertaking several interdisciplinary projects under my advisor, Ephraim Hanks.

These projects include developing a penalized hidden Markov model for ant colony interactions and, more recently, developing novel tools for exploring when model predictions are extrapolating in large-scale, multivariate, spatial models. These two projects are collaborative efforts with the David Hughes lab and the Cont-LIMNO research group, respectively.

In addition to my graduate studies and research, I write and blog about various STEM topics. Together with Rachel Wigginton, I blog on our Sweet Tea, Science blog.