I earned my B.S. in Biology and Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Oklahoma.
The majority of my Ph.D. research employed holistic approaches to investigate how differences at the organismal and community levels drive variation at the microscopic level by studying the microbial communities (i.e., microbiomes) associated with reptile and amphibian hosts.
Near the end of my Ph.D., I became interested in understanding the evolutionary mechanisms that drive venom variation in snakes, motivating me to pursue postdoctoral research focused on functional genomics and snake venom.
In 2024, I earned a RISE100 postdoctoral fellowship to study the gene regulatory networks that underly venom variation in snakes at the University of Texas Arlington. This work utilized functional genomic techniques to identify promoters, enhancers, and transcription factors involved in venom gene regulation.
Now, I’m a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Biology (PRFB) in the Keiser lab at the University of Florida in collaboration with the Colston lab at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez.
My PRFB research employs functional genomics to explore the genomic architecture underlying venom variation in spiders. A critical aim of this work is to test how sociality influences venom and microbiome compositional differences among spiders in the genus Stegodyphus.