Welcome

Thank you for visiting my website! I've always been fascinated by how things work, leading me down a path of physics, biology, and engineering to understand the processes of life, and eventually to becoming a scientist studying infectious diseases and parasites through that lens. I am also an electronics hobbyist and maker, avid motorcyclist, loving husband, and passionate gamer.

Research

My current work as a postdoc is modeling global climate change and its impacts on large-scale phenology using collated databases of organism and environmental variables to predict shifts in seasonality and species interactions, such as predator-prey and host-parasite relationships.

My Ph.D. research has primarily focused on the thermal biology and environmental drivers of snail-borne parasitic flatworms. My aim is to use separate host and parasite temperature-dependent performance measurements in order to describe actual infection data in order to lead to better prediction of disease risk. I also study non-temperature environmental predictors of parasite abundance through large-scale field surveys utilizing DNA detection methods and spatial ecology.

I'm broadly interested in continuing these lines of research in thermal biology and energetics, species interactions, and disease ecology. I hope to eventually have my own research lab, where I will be able to continue to contribute to these fields and predict risk for conservation, water management, and human and veterinary health. A majority of my research efforts rely on open-source hardware and software solutions to obtain specialized measurements and precise temperature control, and I hope to continue to apply this skillset moving forward, especially in risk assessment applications.

For more details, please visit my Research tab!

Extra Life

In 2012, I started supporting Children's Miracle Network Hospitals® and fundraising by playing games for 24-hours through the Extra Life program. Since then, I've raised over $25,000 for Corewell Children's [formerly Beaumont Children's] in Royal Oak, Michigan. I currently serve as the Extra Life Detroit Guild President, an official chapter fostering our local community to the best it can be.

For more information, head over to my Extra Life tab!

Podcast

In early 2017, I founded, hosted, and produced a science podcast (Hashtag Science) with one of my good friends to encourage the two of us to develop our scientific communication skills by talking about current scientific news and journal articles, our research, and interviewing our other friends in science. We are on an indefinite hiatus.

You can read more at the Podcast tab. You can find the show at our website or on iTunes and Google Podcasts!