Research Interests

I research biological communities in patchy, disturbed habitat. This includes how communities assemble and recover after disturbances, and how species disperse and maintain connectivity between habitat patches. I am particularly interested in parasites, their life cycles, their roles in ecosystems, and their dispersal between hosts and among habitat patches. My work has taken me from kelp forests off the coast of Central California, to estuaries in New England, to hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. I use a combination of community-level surveys, field experiments, and mathematical modeling to explore how habitat features such as configuration and disturbance influence the persistence of species with different traits and the recovery of biological communities.