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Adviser

My research interests involve the origins and causal factors affecting skeletal shape change in tetrapods, both over evolutionary time, across populations, and within an individual's lifetime. My project utilizes the crania of Testudines (the group that includes all living turtles, terrapins, and tortoises) to quantify the relationships between skeletal morphology, muscle morphology and function, measures of feeding performance, and ecological variables.

I aim to correlate skeletal shape change at a fine level with functional/performance changes in the feeding system and behavioral changes in the organism, thus linking potential selective pressures to variation in every level of the ecomorphological paradigm.