With the ultimate goal of rescuing species, including our own, from extinction, my collaborators and I design and engineer tools to understand, empathize with, and protect vulnerable wildlife.

I earned bachelor’s degrees with honors in Biology and Chemistry from Caltech, and a master’s degree in Neuroscience from Duke University Medical School. I then completed my doctorate in Animal Behavior at Oxford University, where my thesis focused on African, Asian, and Australian locust immunity, nutrition, and ecology. Following this, I took a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University studying cooperation among species in the Peruvian Amazon and between Australian ants and butterflies. Among other honors, I received the James B. Duke Fellowship, NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, Oxford’s Clarendon Fellowship, Harvard’s Foundational Questions in Evolutionary Biology Prize Fellowship, Harvard’s Faculty Award for Mind, Brain, and Behavior, the Human Frontiers Postdoctoral Fellowship, and the Derek Bok Distinction in Teaching Award.

In 2016, while Director of Research and Development at the San Diego Zoo, I also created and headed a department called Conservation Technology. I was an Associate of the Organismal and Evolutionary Biology Department at Harvard University and a Visiting Scientist at the MIT Media Lab. In 2019, I was a Visiting Scholar at Parsons School of Design, and in 2020 I was named a Senior Fulbright Scholar to India by the US State Department.