| Feb 18, 2026 | Wrote a piece for The Conversation on the science behind my PhD research — explaining how gene-jumping fungi have repeatedly devastated coffee crops across Africa, and why resurrecting their historic genomes can help us understand (and fight) future outbreaks. |
| Dec 12, 2025 | New co-first-author paper in G3: Genes, Genomes, Genetics with Stephanie Steele and Victoria Sork — we show that drought-tolerant blue oak (Quercus douglasii) constitutively expresses many drought-response genes, rather than upregulating them only under stress. A potential new mechanism for drought tolerance in trees! |
| Jul 30, 2025 | Went to Botany 2025 in Palm Springs with the Sork lab 🙌🏼. Gave two talks — one on the ecophysiological response of mature oaks to wildfire, another on changes to the DNA methylome in oak seedlings following drought stress. |
| Jun 01, 2025 | Listened to some fab undergraduate posters and talks at the UCLA EEB research day. I was lucky enough to be a judge and had the difficult decision of scoring each poster! I also gave a ⚡️ talk about my work on stress response in oaks. |
| May 01, 2025 | Returned to the UC Sedgwick reserve to collect another set of leaf morphology and physiology data on burned and unburned valley oak trees |
| Apr 01, 2025 | Invited to present research on oak physiological responses to wildfire at a symposium jointly organized by the Point Conception Institute and the La Kretz Center. |
| Jan 01, 2025 | With the help of UCLA undergrads, measured, planted and counted germination of hundreds of acorns 🌱 |
| Nov 01, 2024 | Began mentoring five UCLA undergrads in a research project looking at the fecundity effects of the Lake Wildfire on valley oak. |
| Oct 15, 2024 | New paper published in PLOS Biology which uses historic strains of the coffee wilt disease pathogen to show that host specificity and disease were driven by serial horizontal transfer events. All analyses, scripts, and code are on . |
| Oct 01, 2024 | New opinion article published in Trends in Plant Science in which we argue that, as in crop plants, some types of DNA methylation in trees can induce phenotypic changes, including changes in climate-relevant traits. This follows recent findings in a few tree species that show phenotypic change following DNA methylation of promoter regions upstream of genes. |
| Sep 10, 2024 | Invited to give a departmental seminar in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology here at UCLA. |
| Jul 28, 2024 | Gave a talk in the Adaptive Epigenetics session at the 3rd Joint Congress on Evolutionary Biology meeting in Montréal: “Can DNA methylation help us understand climate adaptation in trees?” |
| Jul 01, 2024 | The Lake Wildfire erupted in the Santa Ynez Valley, where the UC Sedgwick Reserve is located, a long-term oak study site for the Sork lab. We went up as a lab the week following the fire, and I returned after a month to measure physiological traits of burnt and un-burnt trees… watch this space! |