I am a community ecologist broadly interested in the generation and maintenance of diversity. Currently, I am a Research Associate at the Department of Integrative Biology, University of Texas at Austin and an Associate Junior Fellow with Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg Institute for Advanced Study, Delmenhorst, Germany. Earlier, I was a member of the HIFMB Postdoc Pool at the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity (HIFMB), Oldenburg, Germany. I completed my Ph.D. studying multi-species competition in natural communities, at the Program for Ecology, Evolutionary Biology and Behavior and Department of Plant Biology, Michigan State University.