I am a Teaching Professor in the David S. Olton Program in Behavioral Biology at Johns Hopkins University, where I offer courses in evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology and provide advising and research mentoring experiences to undergraduate students. Previously, I was a tenured Professor of Psychology and Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences at the State University of New York and a Visiting Research Scholar at Syracuse University.

I hold a Ph.D. in Biological Sciences (Ecology, Evolution & Behavior) from Binghamton University and received my postdoctoral training in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University. I am a Fellow of the Psychonomic Society and a recipient of the State University of New York Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Scholarship and the Pineapple Science Award in Medicine. I have over 100 scholarly publications, and my research has been featured in numerous media outlets, including ABC News Good Morning America, CBS Mornings, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and CBS Sunday Morning.

While I conduct research on many topics, ranging from sexual conflict and multilevel selection in water striders to sports and athletics from an evolutionary perspective, a large proportion of my work has focused on the evolution and adaptive significance of yawning. Yawns or yawn-like mandibular gaping patterns occur in a stereotyped form across vertebrate classes, suggesting that this complex reflex has been evolutionarily conserved following its emergence in jawed fish. My research on yawning takes a comparative approach to examining the proximate (causal) and ultimate (functional) mechanisms of both the primitive (spontaneous) and derived (contagious) forms of this response.