I am currently Assistant Director of Collections Operations at the Museum of Comparative Zoology. I manage the museum's Biosafety Level 2 facilities, including the Cryogenic Collections and Vertebrate Preparation Lab, and oversee the museum's collections transactions to ensure legality, integrity, and safety.
I am a biologist interested in biodiversity, biogeography, phylogenetics and conservation of amphibians and reptiles. My research integrates a broad range of techniques, including fieldwork, taxonomy, and molecular systematics, to interpret patterns of speciation and diversity. I am particularly interested in the phylogenetic diversification of African amphibians and use of molecular tools to define species boundaries. Most of my work to date has been involved in investigating two widespread frog families, puddle frogs (Phrynobatrachidae) and grass frogs (Ptychadenidae), to understand the complex diversification patterns of these lineages across sub-Saharan Africa.
I am the creator and administrator of African Amphibians, an online community-driven resource for information on the amphibians of Africa. To learn more about this project, please visit http://africanamphibians.myspecies.info.
From 2013-2019, I was also a lecturer and laboratory instructor for Human Functional Anatomy (HST-010), a class that is part of the Harvard-MIT Health Science curriculum and taught at Harvard Medical School. My goal in teaching was to give future physicians and researchers a comparative perspective of anatomy that integrates development and phylogeny.