Meet the Team

I fell in love with doing research when I did my undergraduate thesis project in a molecular biology lab that worked on Arabidopsis. I obtained my BSc at the University of Waterloo and went on to obtain my MSc at the University of Toronto in Dr. Guojun Yang’s lab. I met Dr. Joel Levine while doing my MSc and subsequently joined his lab as a PhD student to work on Drosophila social behaviour.

My current research involves understanding the genetics behind group social behaviour. In 2012, a student in Dr. Levine’s lab, Jon Schneider, discovered that fruit flies form social interactive networks and that the structure of these social networks can vary between strains of Drosophila. I am interested in determining which genes are responsible for these social differences and, once found, what altering and manipulating these genes will do to group structure.