Hi! I'm Lea, 

I am a behavioral ecologist interested in questions about social behavior, environmental change, and evolutionary ecology. I am fascinated by how social context affects individual behaviors as well as emergent group-level traits. I’ve studied how kin structure affects cooperative breeding in birds, how group size influences collective foraging behavior in schooling fish, and how personality composition influences contests and fine-scale movement of spiders. In addition, I am interested in connecting animal behavior to larger-scale questions in ecological system mechanisms. For example, how do animal movement patterns influence nutrient cycling, or how do urban systems differ from natural ones?

I am a classic New Yorker, passionate about good food and public transportation. I graduated with a BA in Environmental Biology from Columbia University. I received my Ph.D. through the Ecology Graduate Group at University of California, Davis, in Dr. Andy Sih’s lab. I was previously an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellow hosted by Dr. Julia Saltz’s lab at Rice University. I am currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Minnesota working with the Minneapolis-St. Paul Metropolitan Area (MSP) Long Term Ecological Research Program. Please see my CV for detailed information about my research experience.

If anything on here interests you or if you would just like to say hi, I'd love to hear from you! 



Field work in Mongolia, Summer 2018

Field work in Mongolia, Summer 2018

The joys of prepping gels in the lab

The joys of prepping gels in the lab

Watching monkeys

Watching monkeys