Fundamentally, my research is motivated by an interest in understanding how people and wildlife learn to coexist in shared landscapes.
People and wildlife interact as part of a social-ecological system, where social and ecological worlds shape one another. As an interdisciplinary researcher, I bring together tools and theoretical approaches from ecology and the social sciences (primarily cultural anthropology and conservation psychology). Bridging multiple disciplines thus helps me to better understand the systems I study and inform conservation interventions.
My current research is focused on human-wildlife interactions in California, but my work has also spanned carnivore ecology, zoos and aquariums, and environmental education in West Africa. Read on to learn about some of my projects.
Human-wildlife interactions in California
Suburban black bears
My doctoral research at UCLA is focused on American black bears in California neighborhoods. I’m collaborating with community members, wildlife managers, and non-profit organizations to better understand how interactions between people and bears are shaped by social and ecological forces.
Wildlife online
My senior thesis, advised by Dr. Christine Wilkinson & Dr. Chris Schell, asked what we could learn about how people and wildlife interact in Los Angeles through the social media app Nextdoor. We found that Nextdoor offers a valuable datasource for studying urban wildlife, but also that data from the platform has key biases that must be considered. Our findings were recently published in Science of the Total Environment.
Carnivore Ecology
Investigating puma diets with the Middleton Lab
I worked with researchers from UC Berkeley's Middleton Lab on a review of the published literature on puma diets. We found that puma have been documented eating 232 species across their wide range, consuming larger bodied prey closer to the poles and more medium sized prey nearer to the equator.
Zoos and Aquariums
Community engagement
While working as the Oakland Zoo's Program Manager of Community Engagement and Belonging, I conducted research and advanced programs understanding barriers, increasing access, and connecting the zoo to surrounding communities. Specifically, my research mapping audience distributions in the Bay Area led to targeted access efforts in underserved communities of Oakland. Based on this research, I co-led a grant proposal and helped to secure $250,000 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to fund the development of inclusive programming in collaboration with local youth. I'll be presenting on this approach at the Visitor Studies Association conference this summer.
Empathy for wildlife
As an affiliate of the Advancing Conservation Through Empathy for Wildlife Network I collaborate with zoo and aquarium professionals across the country to foster empathy as a learning outcome for zoos and aquariums. At the Oakland Zoo I developed resources and trainings for educators and volunteers which helped them include empathy best practices in their interpretation practice. In collaboration with Stanford University's Social Ecology Lab and the Woodland Park Zoo, I coauthored a literature review summarizing the evidence for empathy as a motivator of conservation action.
Perceptions of wellbeing
My published social science in the zoo setting focuses on how zoo visitors make evaluations of animal wellbeing, and how these perceptions are linked to empathy, anthropomorphism, and learning outcomes. As an undergraduate, I published a quantitative study in the Journal of Zoological and Botanical Gardens demonstrating the relationship between perceptions of wellbeing and affective experience. I built on this work in a 2024 Curator article which drew on qualitative interviews to identify the factors visitors used to evaluate wellbeing, and how they employed empathy and anthropomorphism in these evaluations. I also presented this work in a poster at the 2023 Association of Zoos and Aquariums Conference.
Animal welfare
I began my work at the Oakland Zoo as an intern in the animal care department working with lions, tigers, and camels. My interest in improving outcomes for animals in human care continued as a research fellow, where I oversaw a 6-month study evaluating the impact of the acoustic environment on animal behavior, and co-led a manuscript describing the first known use of a gonadotropin releasing hormone to improve the welfare of a coalition of male African lions, published in Zoo Biology.
Environmental Education in West Africa
Evaluating environmental education with the Ghana Wildlife Society
During my Fall 2019 semester abroad, I collaborated with Dr. Erasmus Owusu and educators at the Ghana Wildlife Society to conduct an evaluation of the Wildlife Clubs of Ghana across ten schools in two regions of Ghana.
Developing curriculum for the Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary
In the summer of 2019, I led the development of an environmental education workbook for the Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary's Tacugama Kids Environmental Education Programme (TKEEP). Since 2021, parts of the workbook have been officially integrated into the National Education Curriculums of Sierra Leone and Liberia.
For more information on my work, check out my CV.