Profile

• Time Zone

  Pacific

  
  
• Organization

  California State University - Northridge

  
  
• Employment Status

  University / College Faculty

  
  
• Role

  Scientist Mentor: I will mentor teams of students online

  
  
• Research Interests (300 words)

  I study plants' interactions with plant-eating animals, mutualist partners like pollinators and beneficial microbes, and parasites or disease organisms — and how these interactions shape the evolutionary history of the interacting species. I've done research with wildflower species, and with Joshua trees, big spiky plants that grow in the desert near where I live in southern California.

  
  
• Profile Question 1

  What is best about being a scientist?

  
  
• Answer the question you selected for profile question 1 here (300 words):

  I love coming up with a question, and then working to find the answer to that question — sometimes it takes an afternoon of reading, and sometimes it ends up being years of data collection and analysis.

  
  
• Profile Question 2

  What is your favorite plant? Why?

  
  
• Answer the question you selected for profile question 2 here (300 words):

  It's hard to pick just one, but I suppose it has to be Joshua trees. They're really weird, unique plants that grow in beautiful desert landscapes. They're also partners in a very unusual mutually beneficial relationship, with tiny specialized moths — the moths are the only animal that pollinates Joshua trees, and they do it because their larvae eat only Joshua tree seeds. A moth lays her eggs in a Joshua tree flower, then pollinates it to feed her babies, by deliberately packing pollen into the receptive part of the flower. Very few other plants have pollinators that provide this kind of dedicated service, and it makes Joshua trees and their moths a great example for studying mutually beneficial interactions between species.

  
  
• Profile Question 3

  What is the coolest thing you have discovered or learned about plants?

  
  
• Answer the question you selected for profile question 3 here (300 words):

  There's a few options here, too, but one result that made me very excited was finding how the shape of a flower determines the diversity of animals that visit it to drink nectar or take pollen. Plants with radially symmetric flowers — where there's no one way to approach the flower — consistently have more different species visiting their flowers than plants with bilaterally symmetrical flowers — which only let visitors approach from one angle, and control how visitors interact with the flower. That pattern holds across many different communities, in temperate and tropical regions, and it helps explain how plant-pollinator interactions have promoted the evolution of so many species of flowering plants.

  
  
• Preferred Student Level(s)

  Elementary School Students (5th grade)
  Middle School Students (Grades 6,7,8)
  High School Students (Grades 9,10,11,12)

  
  
• In addition to English, I am comfortable communicating with students in the following languages:

  None of the Above

  
  
• Capacity: How many teams at a time are you comfortable working with?

  2