My research program addresses 1) the evolution of morphological, behavioral, and ecological traits related to locomotion, and 2) how these relationships play out over different timescales. I am particularly interested in biomechanics as an approach for studying the link between behavior and underlying traits. The biomechanics toolkit offers an exciting avenue for rigorously quantifying behavior and performance. Several of my projects have employed phylogenetic comparative methods to study evolutionary morphology, and others have involved high-speed videography combined statistical methods such as path analysis to test hypothesized causal relationships and correlations among morphological, kinematic, and performance variables. More recently, I have also begun to use mathematical modelling and biplanar fluoromicroscopy to take a deeper dive into the muscular mechanisms of locomotion, which I hope to eventually combine with a macroevolutionary approach to tackle questions of functional adaptation.

Snake locomotion is particularly conducive to studying many of my driving questions. Unlike locomotion in limbed terrestrial vertebrates, snakes choose different locomotor modes depending more on the characteristics of their physical environment than on their travelling speed. They can move in an enormous variety of ways, allowing snake species into numerous habitats that would remain closed to them if they could use only the lateral undulation common to all limbless squamate reptiles. Different modes of snake locomotion impose different requirements on axial musculoskeletal morphology and physiology. The intimate connection between organism and environment, and among organismal traits on different levels, make snake locomotion a compelling system.