I am a behavioral ecologist and evolutionary biologist at Tulane University. My dissertation research seeks to untangle the relative contributions of genes, the environment, and their interactions in shaping male mating success in the white-bearded manakin, a lek-mating tropical bird with high male reproductive skew. I am particularly interested in how sexual selection processes may be influenced by ecological variability in time and space, and whether this variability plays a role in the maintenance of genetic variation in sexually selected traits in nature. I am also interested in the genomic impacts of strong sexual selection and, in particular, the potential for the Z:A ratio (i.e., the ratio of nucleotide diversity on male-biased sex chromosomes vs. autosomes) to serve as a 'yardstick' of sexual selection strength in a given avian lineage. I am exploring the latter question both within the genus Manacus and across the wider manakin phylogeny. I have experience in field biology, statistical modeling, molecular lab work, bioinformatics, behavioral observation, and ornithology.