I'm a post-doctoral research fellow at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.
I'm interested in how social groups and social systems shape development. My research uses primate and bat species to understand how social interactions and feeding ecology change throughout an animal's lifetime and how social rules influence those changes.
I also try to understand the flexibility of sociality under energetic and ecological constraints. I'm interested in knowing if and how social interactions and social information can be leveraged to find food. I am especially interested in the role that social processes have had in the evolution of the juvenile phase of development, particularly in the primates where an exaggerated juvenile period is a particularly sensitive time for learning, building social relationships, and refining ecological skills.
