Academic Biography

I am currently investigating psychological adaptation for avoiding and combating infection, the nature of the emotion "disgust", sex-specific costs to mating, and various applications of endicronology for understanding disease-avoidance and mating. I am also generally interested in sexual strategies, between and within group prejudice and stigmatization, quantitative methods, and life history theory applications to psychology.

I attended Arizona State University as an undergraduate and had the privilege to learn from professors who were not only great researchers but skilled instructors and mentors. I developed many of my current research interests and ideas during my five semester membership in Steve Neuberg’s prejudice and stigma lab, my employment in Doug Kenrick and Steve Neuberg's social cognition lab, and my completion of an undergraduate honors thesis under Stan Parkinson's advisement. I was also fortunate to learn from some excellent graduate students at ASU.

I am currently a fifth year graduate student in the Evolutionary Psychology Ph.D. program at the University of New Mexico. In addition to studying evolutionary psychology, I also greatly enjoy taking statistics classes. I also pay the bills by teaching the first year graduate statistics lab during fall and spring semesters and undergraduate statistics in the summer. I am primarily advised by Geoffrey Miller and Steve Gangestad, and I occasionally get advice from Randy Thornhill in UNM’s biology department. I benefit greatly from the general academic atmosphere of UNM’s HEBS network.

Personally, I enjoy cooking, sampling new wines and beers, playing ultimate frisbee, riding my bike around, and engaging in various other exercise related activities.