My undergraduate major was ecology and philosophy (everybody designed their own). For my senior thesis
I studied forest succession in central Pennsylvania ridge top communities following Gypsy Moth disturbance.
I'm still interested in plant ecology, particularly the history of successional theory.

My master's degree was in Biology and for my thesis work I used experimental populations of Sacchromyces
cerevisiae (brewer's yeast) to ask some questions about adaptive divergence, resource partitioning, and trends
in fitness over evolutionary time (~1000 generations). During the summer of 2006 I returned to the lab of Dr. Sean
O'Connell to conintue this work. I hope to publish my results sooner rather than later.

These days I am interested broadly in the history and philosophy of biology. In the philosophy of biology I'm
concerned mainly with our understanding of fundamental concepts such as drift and selection and how they affect both
theoretical arguments and experimental practice. In particular, I think that recent epistemological and conceptual
arguments about the causal status of drift and selection constrain each other in ways that are helpful in making
progress in the debate over the causal status of population genetics processes. In my dissertation I will
(hopefully) apply this idea to the levels of selection debate and the history of research on founder effect
speciation.

I'm also interested in Darwin studies, namely Darwin's principle of divergence, his understanding of speciation
and his views on human race evolution. I'm interested in the history of speciation from Darwin to the present,
particularly founder effect speciation and sympatric speciation, and I suspect that some of Darwin's thinking,
namely his motivations for adopting the principle of divergence, a form of sympatric speciation, may be helpful
in making progress in current debates about speciation.