"I like to follow the most interesting things around me. Whatever it is, I unfortunately or fortunately have the gene to chase it down and keep going into the rabbit hole. It's been useful in this career to bite onto some random interesting thing and chase it to the end. I could have been a different kind of scientist. I could have been a paleontologist. I could have studied birds! I was a huge dinosaur person as a kid, and birds are modern day dinosaurs. I think about evolution a lot. Everything I do is in the context of how this fits into the history of life. When I finished my PhD, my partner took me to some islands off the coast of Iceland. We went for a puffin fledgling season because that’s the only time they're on land. They spend their lives in the ocean, but right now, they need to have babies, so they hang out on the cliffs. They're really terrible flyers. They have this erratic flight pattern, like bats. They are surprisingly fast but like a ball with really flappy wings. I love them. I just came back 3 days ago from Hawaii to look at baby Albatrosses. I saw them on lawns of people's houses; their parents had them there, their grandparents had them there, their great-grandparents had them there. Then we humans decided to build a house, and the birds were like, “Yep, we don't care. This is where I must have my babies, on this lawn next to your fire hydrant.” Seeing such majestic birds just plopped on a driveway is a reminder that we're all just sharing this one planet. I recently upgraded my wildlife camera, and I am just beginning to photograph birds from around the world. We're planning a trip to Australia and New Zealand which is the area with the craziest amount of bird diversity. I find myself hyperaware whenever birds are around. l always remember where I saw a bird the first time, who I was with and what stage of my life I was in. It’s part of my memory system. I would like to see as many species as possible. No huge rush, although I should start with the ones that are really endangered. The way I think about birding has evolved. Before it was like, I just want to see the animals. But now I'm like, what can we do to keep them around longer?"