Through combined opportunistic sampling of individuals experiencing naturally occurring stressors and experimental manipulation (e.g., temperature, hormone treatment, pathogen exposure), I work to explain how environmental change manifests as physiological changes at the individual and population levels. To better understand how animals may cope (or fail to cope) with stressors, I use the most appropriate reptile study system to approach each question. For example, I manipulated stress hormone levels via steroid implants in a subset of wild, radio-tracked snakes and assessed movement, behavior, thermoregulation, and venom composition in a first-of-its-kind field study.  I have also documented different glucocorticoid-reactivity phenotypes among populations of 2 lizard species experiencing resource restriction and adapting to novel environments. There is much cross-talk among my other areas of research, as disease, invasion into new areas, and changing thermal environments may all interact as stressors.

I plan to expand this area of research to pursue in-depth investigation in stress endocrinology in squamates to understand the role of plasticity and flexibility in coping with stressors and the evolution of this system in different environmental contexts. Specifically, I aim to investigate how changes in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal/interrenal (HPA/I) axis at gene expression and molecular levels manifest as phenotypic change in squamates, and the functional consequences of these changes.