I am currently a PhD student at the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science in the lab of Dr. Robb Brumfield. A passionate birder from the age of seven, I have spent many months in the field studying birds in remote regions across the globe. It was also at Cornell that I became engrossed in the explanatory power of evolutionary biology. Classes and especially informal discussions with graduate students and professors spurred my desire to incorporate evolutionary ideas into everything I think about. My academic development has coincided with the emergence of revolutionary new DNA sequencing technologies, and I am excited to be at the cutting edge of using these tools to address previously unanswerable evolutionary questions. I am pursuing all of these interests as a graduate student studying bird evolution.