My Personal Background

I was born and raised predominantly in Peoria, Illinois and New York City. I moved to Granville, OH in the fall of 2003 to attend Denison University, majoring in psychology with a minor in biology.

While at Denison, I spent two and a half years as a research assistant for Dr. Cody Brooks studying rat models of anxiety and substance abuse relapse. I assisted with spontaneous recovery studies involving restraint stress, open-field exploration, and conditioned taste aversion. In 2006, I participated in an internship with the U.S. Navy's Marine Mammal Program (MMP) in San Diego, CA where I gained experience in dolphin and sea lion husbandry, assisted with bioacoustics research, and conducted an independent observational study of captive dolphins' use of enclosure space. My undergraduate honor's thesis, "An Assessment of Integrating Ultrasonic Vocalizations into a Sensory Pre-Conditioning Paradigm with Rats," investigated food-cup checking behavior when the conditioned stimulus was either ecologically relevant (e.g., "happy" rat ultrasonic vocalizations) or artificial (e.g., tone).

I graduated in 2007 and pursued my interest in animal communication by moving to Athens, GA to attend graduate school at the University of Georgia. I worked under the advisement of Dr. Dorothy Fragaszy in the Primate Cognition and Behavior Lab. My master's thesis examined the effects of manipulating social context on a companion African Grey parrot's frequency and content of vocalizations; my dissertation followed up on that work by looking specifically for evidence of human-like features of language.

Now, I am an associate professor of psychology at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, WA, and the director of the Animal Behavior and Cognition Lab. My students and I focus broadly on human-nonhuman interaction, with a recent focus on dogs' use of humans' social cues to make decisions.

Dolphin training at MMP

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Lovely Ms. 53!

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Rescued female eclectus