My research interests generally span across the topic of behavioral flexibility, or the ability of organisms to adjust their behavior to better suit their environmental conditions. An exciting component of this research is that these questions can be asked at various levels of organization as well as in a variety of biological systems and related perturbations. During my doctoral research, I investigated how individual traits of monkeys as well as their diversity of techniques predicted their ability to solve novel problems introduced into their environments. Additionally, as a member of the WhaleSETI research team I am interested in quantifying the communicative complexity, flexibility, and function of acoustic signals in humpback whales. Although different in scope, all projects have an underlying component of understanding how animals employ behavioral flexibility to cope with increasing anthropogenic pressures (e.g. introduced novel objects for monkeys, introduced sound pollution for whales), with the aim of informing conservation plans to understand how to help these organisms thrive in an ever changing world dominated by humans. As a postdoctoral scholar, I look forward to expanding our knowledge on the range of behavioral flexibility expressed by different biological species using behavioral, acoustic and developmental lenses.
McCowan-Vandeleest Laboratory of Biobehavioral Complexity 