I am a wildlife conservation biologist interested in spatiotemporal ecology, behavior, phylogenetics, and interdisciplinary conservation approaches. Often, my research involves amphibians and reptiles. I've had a lifelong interest in the smooth greensnake (Opheodrys vernalis; hence the namesake) and continue to research that taxon.

Taxonomy is fascinating, ever-growing, and often fuzzy—not everyone agrees on how to go about distinguishing species. For herpetofauna, I follow the committee-based taxonomic review of SSAR (Crother et al.; https://ssarherps.org/cndb/). And I caution against using trivial trinomials (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ece3.9069).