how did i get here?

I wonder that, too. And I think often on how to help others pursue their own scientific journey.

Maybe the reason why I study what I study—plant responses to many different stressors, and the ramifications on their offspring—comes from early life experiences.

My mother is a child abuse pediatrician who saved many young lives. She thought a lot about how stress in one generation can impact the next generation, and eventually talked about it to my sister and me when we were old enough to hear it.

She is also a sci-fi nerd, and gave me a copy of Frank Herbert’s Dune when I was a young teenager. The Imperial Ecologist Liet Kynes is still the ecologist I wish I could be, and I would recommend that everyone read his character’s “essay” at the end of the book before you read the main story itself. It will inspire anyone interested in ecology with the argument that ecological forces, if properly harnessed, would be the most powerful force on the planet.

My father was, among many things, a gardener. Time with him under the Florida sun created an appreciation for rich soil, fabulous plants, and the duality of rain, sunlight, and heat: forces for both growth and destruction.

And I am grateful that he and my mother loved to simply talk over dinner and pose questions to my sister and me. I think it’s no coincidence she also became a scientist.

And I then had the very good luck to encounter Todd Palmer as a second-year undergraduate student at the University of Florida. His field school threw me into a wild world of insect behavior and interactions with plants. At a miniscule scale, I saw all of these ideas come to life that had previously existed on the pages of books - massive altruism and collective action (in ant colonies), landscape-scale forces driven by foundational species like whistling acacias. I began a 7 year long journey where I re-learned how to ask questions and rethink cause and effect in natural systems, first as an undergraduate research assistant (2013-2015) and then as a PhD student (2015-2020).

I joined the Pringle Lab at University of Nevada, Reno, in 2021, at a time of great social upheaval in the United States. My research as a postdoctoral scholar has focused on the ways that stressors and interactions with animals change the physiology of plants, the epigenetics that underpin those changes, and the possibility that such epigenetic changes and their attendant phenotypic shifts are inherited by offspring. When I am not thinking about my research, I often find myself considering that we, as a human species, are also grappling with those same forces—intergenerational consequences of stress and adversity, unequal access to resources, and differential effects of stress on different groups.

As a scientist hoping to be a part of the academic community in my future career stages, my ultimate goal is to lead scientific projects and mentor a generation of ecologists that will achieve two intertwined goals:

1) Achieve a better understanding of the complex interactions that characterize and structure our ecosystems (in my case, biting off a piece that’s maybe small enough to chew: plant interactions with different animals)

2) Achieve a more wholistic understanding of human nature, that we might recognize mutualism as an important force in a world overfocused on competition.