I received my B.S. degree in 1993 from Ferrum College in southwestern Virginia with majors in Biology and Environmental Science and minor studies in chemistry and philosophy. At Ferrum, I pursued my organismal interest in bats through studies of habitat choice by tropical bats in Costa Rica and of roosting and foraging behavior of an endangered species in Virginia. I then attended the University of Georgia where I obtained an M.S. degree in Entomology studying the effects of above-ground herbivory on plant carbon allocation and soil food webs under the supervision of Dr. D.A. Crossley at the Institute of Ecology's agroecosystem facility. I completed my Ph.D. in the Department of Biology at the University of Miami in 2001. My Ph.D. advisor, Dr. Ted Fleming, and I discovered the pollinating seed-consuming mutualism between senita cacti and senita moths in the Sonoran Desert. The senita mutualism served as a model study system for my dissertation on the population ecology of mutualism. In 2001 I was awarded a National Parks Ecological Research Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Ecological Society of America. As a postdoctoral fellow, I joined the laboratory of Dr. Judith Bronstein in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona. In 2003 I accepted an assistant professor position in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Rice University. I continue to use the senita mutualism as a model system to develop theory and investigate the influences of interspecific interactions on the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of populations and communities.