After graduating from TESC in 1994, I went to Western Carolina University (Cullowhee, North Carolina) to work on a masters degree. I am currently pursuing a Ph.D. from The George Washington University (Washington, D.C.) with support from the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History. My position gives me the opportunity to do a good deal of traveling. In the past three years, I have worked in Tanzania, Colombia, Costa Rica and Guyana. My primary interest is in the evolution and biodiversity of spiders.

Spiders are the seventh most diverse order of organisms with 35,000 species described, an estimated 20% of the total number. The Smithsonian is interested in documenting world biodiversity at the end of the twentieth century. As global forest cover continues to decline, spider diversity is certain to decrease as well. We use repeatable methods to provide baseline data on spider biodiversity. Later generations of scientists will be able to repeat our studies and quantify declines.

Investigating the evolution of spiders involves obtaining specimens, making observations about the characteristics of each species, organizing observations into a matrix, and formulating a hypothesis to account for all the different changes in homologous characteristics. With so many species undescribed, collecting expeditions nearly always yield new species, especially from tropical regions. These new or poorly known taxa may be key to resolving relationships among groups of spiders. Although a few parts of the world have nearly complete knowledge of their spider fauna (e.g., western Europe, Japan), most of the world is poorly known. Even in the United States, taxonomic knowledge is spotty with some groups well known and others difficult to identify, even as to genus.

My other interests include the philosophy of science, methods of phylogenetic reconstruction, and using the Internet to freely and instantaneously distribute information about specimen records, species identification, and taxonomic relationships.