Research Interest

My research interests focus on individual variation in physiological and behavioral traits, their influence on an individual's health, fitness and probability of survival, and understanding how environmental change acts as a mediating force. I aim to understand the behavioral and physiological responses that allow animals to adapt to natural and anthropogenic changes in their environment, and to assess the consequences of these responses for health, survival, and fitness. I am currently conducting projects to unravel how environmental constraints, such as variation in climatic variables and food availability, and human-induced rapid environmental change, together with within-individual variation in behavior, physiology, and health, shape life-history traits and ultimately fitness and survival.

Biography

In 2013, I received my Ph.D. in Biodiversity and Ecology from the Georg-August-University of Göttingen, Germany (advisor: Eckhard Heymann). For my PhD research, I investigated the behavioral and endocrine responses of two Colombian primate species to forest fragmentation. Subsequently, I was a postdoctoral fellow (2014 - 2016) and a Claude Leon postdoctoral fellow (2017 - 2018) at the School of Animal, Plant and Environmental Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa (advisors: Carsten Schradin and Nevile Pillay). During these positions, I led numerous ecophysiological projects combining measurements of resting metabolic rate, daily energy expenditure (using the doubly labeled water method), and behavioral observations to disentangle whether individuals regulate their energy expenditure through physiological and/or behavioral adaptations, and to investigate which environmental factors drive changes in resting metabolic rate in African striped mice inhabiting the Succulent Karoo. I then joined the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke University, USA, as a postdoctoral fellow (2019 - 2021) and worked on a range of mammalian species, including non-primates and humans (mentor: Herman Pontzer). I tested the hypothesis that urbanization negatively affects physiology and health by studying eastern grey squirrels in natural and urbanized habitats. In humans, we showed that daily energy expenditure is not associated with short-term changes in adult body composition. In October 2022, I joined the Department of Behavioural Biology, University of Münster, Germany as a senior postdoc (mentor: Melanie Dammhahn). In Münster, we study changes in small mammal communities and responses to novel food items along an urbanization gradient. We also assess urbanization-related changes in metabolic rates, health parameters, microbiomes, and coping styles in three small mammal species.