For the past several weeks I’ve been in southern Mexico. The first week I flew into Mexico City and met up with Norma Manriquez-Morán, a professor at the Autonomous University of Hidalgo, and her student Anahí, as well as two students from Adrián Nieto’s lab at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Daniel and … More Fieldwork in Southern Mexico

I recently returned from some fieldwork in the southwestern U.S. where we were studying whiptail lizards. The goal of the trip was to go back and visit a number of historically important localities and collect samples. This was my most extensive experience with fieldwork in New Mexico and Arizona, most of my previous work on … More Whiptail hunting in Arizona and New Mexico

I was lucky to get to go back and do some fieldwork in Oaxaca again this fall! This time, I was mostly helping Anne Chambers out again catching leopard frogs for her dissertation research. It was a really great follow up my summer fieldwork where we spent the entire  time working our way along the … More Frogging in Oaxaca

This summer was a bit of a whirlwind between fieldwork and teaching a course, so I am just now getting a chance to catch up and do a quick post about all the happenings. As per usual, Bob Thomson, Greg Pauly, and I started out the field season with a trip to the Mojave Desert … More Summer 2018

This summer I taught my first big undergraduate class as the instructor of record and thought it would be a good time to reflect on what an awesome experience it was! I’ve had a number of other teaching experiences in smaller settings that were less intense, but nothing really prepares you to be THE person … More Teaching Intro to Evolution

This past week I was invited to help put together an exhibit for NightLife at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. This is a neat weekly public outreach event that blends natural history, cocktails, and music. Lauren Scheinberg (the Herpetology Collections Manager) and I put together a table with a bunch of legless amphibian … More NightLife at the California Academy of Sciences!

Last month, me and several other members of the Wainwright lab ran an exhibit at UC Davis’s annual Biodiversity Museum Day. At the event, museums across campus are opened to the public so that children and adults can learn about collections at the university (such as the natural history collections at the Museum of Wildlife … More Biodiversity Museum Day

I recently returned from a fieldwork trip to Hidalgo, Mexico. I was there primarily catching leopard frogs to help out some colleagues: Anne Chambers and David Hillis from the University of Texas and Daniel Lara-Tufiño, a Mexican graduate student working with Adrián Nieto at UNAM. Anne and David (along with their Mexican collaborators) are working … More Leopard Frogs and Hidalgo

Just got back from our annual fieldwork trip to the Mojave Desert. We were out working in the desert in California and Nevada for the last two weeks of May. We went to six different sites this year, and for the most part, things went really smoothly. We started this trip spending a couple days … More Mojave Fieldwork 2017

I recently returned from a trip to Mexico City. I was there for a couple weeks, working with my collaborator Adrián Nieto at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). We’re working on trying to finish up a couple manuscripts on the phylogeny of Mexican whiptails. It was a really productive, fun trip, and was … More Mexico Trip