Stearns Graduate Student Prize announced
December 2024
It is an honour to announce that my PhD work on the multiple mutualisms of Turnera ulmifolia was selected by the editorial board of the Journal of Evolutionary Biology and the European Society for Evolutionary Biology to receive the Stearns Graduate Student Prize for 2023, which recognizes outstanding MSc and PhD student papers.
In this project, I collected samples from diverse T. ulmifolia populations across Jamaica and phenotyped almost greenhouse 2,000 plants for reward traits associated with pollination, biotic defence, and seed dispersal mutualisms. This research elucidated the potential for genetic correlations among mutualistic reward traits to constrain the multivariate evolution of multiple mutualist communities, linking together the fates of partnerships that are sometimes at odds with one another in nature. I am excited to present this work at ESEB 2025 in Barcelona, Spain this August!
Postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Guelph
September 2024
I'm thrilled to announce that I am joining Dr. Joey Bernhardt's lab at the University of Guelph as a new postdoctoral fellow in the Centre for Ecosystem Management!
In this position, I will be tackling important questions about the impact of microbiomes on promoting stress tolerance and expanding niche range in their hosts, focusing on abiotic stressors associated with global change and urbanization. My research will also address the impact of evolutionary trade-offs on key ecological traits of experimentally evolved algae populations.
