Success in life, for humans and all animals, requires multitasking. Multitasking — the simultaneous execution of two or more behaviors by a single agent — may at times seem effortless and safe, such as walking and talking, or challenging and potentially fatal, such as driving and texting. Performance differences between different multitasking contexts are likely reflected in the cognitive demands of the constituent behaviors, yet the neural substrates that facilitate or constrain multitasking remain unknown.

Recent innovations in biology education research focus on promoting equity in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) by humanizing biology. Research from my lab on this topic can be split into two broad avenues of inquiry, including the impacts of (1) promoting counter-stereotypical role models on student outcomes and (2) contextualizing societal and ethical considerations into biology curricula with ideological awareness.

Stronger metacognition, or knowledge and regulation of thinking, is linked to increased learning, problem solving, and academic achievement. Metacognition has primarily been studied using retrospective methods, but these methods limit access to students’ in-the-moment thoughts and actions. Using in-the-moment methods of think aloud interviews and discourse analysis, we investigated first year life science students’ individual metacognition while they solved challenging problems and upper-division biology students’ social metacognition during small-group problem solving.

The biosphere is a network of interacting species that connects organisms across all scales, from microbes to mammals. Knowledge of the mechanisms underlying these relationships, and the evolutionary forces that shape them, is fragmentary. My lab has pioneered the study of rove beetles (Staphylinidae) as a model clade to break open basic problems in organismal interactions. Most of the >66,000 known rove beetle species are free-living predators, found in leaf litter and soil habitats spanning the globe.