About me

I'm currently the founder of 3D Anatomy Studios, a cooperative dedicated to building the next generation of learning tools for anatomy and physiology. Please see our website or connect with me on linkedIn for more updated information on what I'm up to.

Prior to starting 3D Anatomy Studios, I was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Ecology, Evolutionary, and Organismal Biology at Brown University studying the evolution of musculoskeletal systems. My research focused on the biomechanical principles governing how organisms produce motion and how these principles have influenced the evolution and diversification of vertebrate musculoskeletal systems. I addressed these questions by integrating in vivo experimentation, morphological surveys of natural history specimens, and biomechanical modeling. My research also included developing open-source software for shape data collection, computational modeling and web-based visualization.

I completed my PhD with Mark Westneat at the University of Chicago. For my PhD I studied the evolution of feeding in the bird order Anseriformes (waterfowl), integrating ecological data from the literature, morphological data from natural history collections, and functional predictions based on biomechanical modeling, particularly cranial kinesis.

As a postdoctoral fellow I worked with Beth Brainerd at Brown University to combine in vivo kinematics collected using XROMM, biomechanical modeling, and collections-based approaches to understand how the biomechanics of suction feeding has influenced the diversification of body forms in ray-finned fishes. As a part of this project, Beth Brainerd, Ariel Camp, and I published a paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology on a linkage that helps drive mouth expansion in the largemouth bass; this work was featured by the New York Times ScienceTake.