I am an evolutionary biologist and postdoctoral fellow at Penn State. I obtained my PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2018. I primarily study evolutionary behavioral ecology, which is a field that investigates the fitness consequences of animal behavior. My research focuses on social behavior in paper wasps, ants, and social spiders using an “animal personalities” framework.

If you’re interested in my work, check out my Google Scholar page, or email me (warmlittlepond@gmail.com) and I’ll gladly send you PDFs of any of my published work.

Apart from my academic work, I am an atheist, humanist, and am broadly interested in religion and philosophy. I am also very into fitness, and have a burning love for whiskey and most other spirits you throw in oak barrels!

What is the significance of a warm little pond? Charles Darwin, in a letter to the botanist Joseph Hooker in 1871, speculating on the origin of life wrote:

It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are present, which could ever have been present. But if (and Oh! what a big if!) we could conceive in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, etc., present, that a protein compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present-day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.

For Darwin, the imagery of a warm little pond served as a place of extreme fertility and potential, where life might have emerged. For me and this blog, the image of a warm little pond serves an incubator for ideas. A place where thoughts float around in hopes that they might find a conceptual nucleation point and crystalize into something new.