My work in teaching, scholarship, and service utilize a systems thinking approach. I will provide a framework for my approach to institutional change and efforts to reduce the structural and systemic inequities students and faculty face. I will outline the value of systems thinking as an organizing principle in the classroom. I will share strategies based on this approach that improve student engagement in classes and result in increased academic performance in our rigorous Biology classes.

Widespread tree mortality following disturbances such as droughts, fire, and pest and pathogen outbreaks has emerged as an environmentally and economically devastating ‘ecological surprise’. Increases in disturbance-driven tree mortality with further climate change has the potential to massively disrupt terrestrial ecosystem productivity and biodiversity, causing Earth’s forests to release carbon into the atmosphere.

Animals are constantly faced with decisions about what to eat, where to live, and whom to mate with. While most models of decision making assume that individuals assign absolute values to options encountered, animals often assess value relative to other options available or to options recently encountered. Such decisions can be complex, often requiring individuals to compare multiple features associated with each option and their reward payoffs. Such decisions can also produce different outcomes depending on the context of the choice.

Our intestinal microbial community is quickly evolving with us, following changes to modern lifestyles and even throughout our lifetimes. I aim to understand how horizontal gene transfer shapes interactions in the microbiota and the implications of this pervasive phenomenon for community properties relevant to human health (e.g. resilience of a healthy microbiota to perturbations). I identified a large conjugative plasmid that frequently transfers to multiple species within a person and mediates the formation of multi-species biofilms.

Mammals maintain stable body temperature largely independent of the temperature of their environment and even small deviations from optimal internal temperature can threaten their survival. Thermoregulation critically depends on the ability to sense deep body temperature by the intrinsically warm and cold-sensitive neurons in the preoptic area of the hypothalamus (POA). However, the precise physiological roles of the temperature-sensitive POA neurons and the molecular mechanisms responsible for their temperature sensitivity are poorly understood.

Is the sexual reproduction of a Eukaryotic adaption to reduce the probability of passing on genomes that have lost genes to DNA break mis-repair? or Why the Pachytene Checkpoint?