My work with the Oxford Flight group focuses on understanding how to integrate a view of the animal within a view of its environment. This takes many forms from building quantitative frameworks for understanding avian reaction time versus wind turbine pattering to flying birds of prey in natural environments. I hope to both utilize modern, high fidelity/throughput data methods to better situate our understanding of animals in their environment and also push the boundaries of the kinds of questions we can ask with those methods. Before Oxford, I received my undergraduate degree in robotics, philosophy, and biology from Harvard University. While at Harvard, I also received my master’s in computer science. During my undergraduate career, I primarily worked under Professor Robert Wood in the Harvard Microrobotics Lab. As I spent more time looking to biology for inspiration for robotics, I found myself drawn in by fundamental questions of form and function in organisms. This led me to do fieldwork in Arizona under Deborah Gordon (working with harvester ants), write an undergraduate thesis on the water-running of basilisk lizards, and study ant mandibles with Evan Economo at OIST in Okinawa, Japan. I am interested in utilizing modern techniques such as 3D imaging, motion capture, and robotic models to better understand how animals exist in the world. I have previously done research in robotics (EPFL, Harvard), biology (Harvard, Stanford, OIST), and philosophy (Harvard). I have ongoing research projects in evolutionary graph theory w/ Martin Nowak, adaptation in birds of prey w/ Scott Edwards, philosophy of biology, and ant mandibles w/ Evan Economo.
