My professional training has been interdisciplinary and geographically diverse with coursework, fieldwork and research centering on human-environmental interactions, spatial analysis and collaboration with local and indigenous communities.  Throughout the last ten years, my research has focused on the investigation of plant macroremains (seeds and wood charcoal) recovered from archaeological sites. I have become intimate with the regional and local topographies of cultural and environmental landscapes in both Europe and North America. Within those landscapes, it is from the material manifestations of plant use that I seek to understand the relationships between nature and culture in the past and how they are related to and affect our socio-ecological interactions in the present and future.
I have and continue to work in various geographic locations and temporal periods to understand human-environmental interactions across time and space, which includes EarlyArchaic sites underwater in the Gulf of Mexico to Copper Age sites in Hungary. My current interdisciplinary collaboration with the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe, located in southeastern Connecticut, explores the adaptability of traditional plant practices within this historically politically marginalized indigenous community. Through an analysis of the archaeobotanical remains recovered from Mashantucket Pequot archaeological sites from 9000 years ago into the post-Contact period, I am able to reconstruct the continuities in traditional plant use at the household and communities level. This type of research situates the cultural and ecological legacy of indigenous communities and also develops better understandings of contemporary and past archaeological societies confronting issues of resource depletion, changes to local and global environments and industrialization.