I became enthralled with animal behaviour and research as an undergraduate at the University of Toronto at Mississauga where I did a double major in Biology and Psychology. My thesis research project on shoaling behaviour in fish led to my first publication.
I continued at the University of Toronto for a Master’s of Science degree in Zoology working on behaviour in larval damselflies. I was, and continue to be, primarily interested in how organisms cope with the trade-offs they face, most notably avoiding predation while foraging successfully.
At this stage, I came to recognize that the questions I was interested in were deeply intertwined with ecology and evolution and thus looked to expand my expertise with a project that incorporated these fields. I did this under the excellent tutelage of Mark A. McPeek at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, USA. My dissertation research was on frog larval communities (tadpoles when I was doing fieldwork in New England; pollywogs when I was doing fieldwork in Florida!)
After finishing my PhD, I spent a year as a post-doctoral researcher in Tallahassee, FL in the lab of Joe Travis studying both frogs and fish, and as a lecturer in a senior level Evolution course. I then moved back to Canada and the University of Toronto, where I did post-doctoral research with Helen Rodd and also did some sessional lecturing.
In 2002, I accepted a position as Assistant Professor at Brock University, where I taught field courses (at the Wildlife Research Station in Algonquin Park), ecology, evolution, and animal behaviour. I also set up my own lab and mentored countless undergraduate and some graduate students.
In 2008 I jumped at the chance to go back to research full-time, accepting a position as a research associate at the University of Victoria for 2 years (they did also convince me to teach a biostatistics course), and then moving to the
I moved back to Ontario (specifically, London) to be near family in 2014. I am working freelance, with a focus on science editing and biostatistical analysis.