I encourage you to drop in. I have an open-door policy, so in fact feel free to just stop by at other times and see if I am available. Email is always a good way to reach me, and I will happily set up.
I am a behavioural and population ecologist with a background in mammalian behaviour and population dynamics. My driving interest is understanding the choices made at the individual animal level to explain where they are found and how they move on the landscape.
A fascinating component to this is the personality of the animal itself. I look at mammalian temperament both in the lab and in the field. In the lab, we can test animals over and over again, which helps us examine the development of behavioral tendencies, the plasticity of these behaviors, and how different temperaments may correlate with one another in the population (a phenomenon called a behavioral syndrome). Using the Siberian dwarf hamster as a model, we are currently examining whether juvenile movements during early independence (including dispersal-like movements) are consistent with their activity personality later in life.
In the field we look more at the external factors, particularly human infrastructure impacts, on animal movement. In fall 2025, we piloting a project to examine movement of red-backed salamanders around recreation trails. This is a natural progression from our just-published study showing that deer mice move significantly less across trails than would be expected. We are designing the salamander study to collect data in comparable ways to our collaborators, the Hedrick lab at Cornell, so that the results of our studies will be able to be combined for broader understanding of red-backed salamander movement around human use of the woods.
Exciting news!! The Park Foundation in April 2026 has awarded a grant to a collaboration between the Kanda and Hedrick labs for conducting new research and public outreach education on the population dynamics and the conservation efforts on spotted salamanders at Thomas Road in Caroline! Since 2008 I have been getting IC students involved in volunteer conservation efforts, heading out on rainy spring nights to move animals safely across the road as they migrate to the adjacent wetlands for breeding (shout-out to retired IC faculty John Confer, who got me involved!) Last year I ended a long-term study begun in 2013 tracking tagged cohorts of spotted salamanders as they annually return (or fail to return) to cross the road each year. Now we will be tracking a new cohort of adults and also adding information on juveniles as they leave the wetlands! We will also be able to strengthen support of the new Tompkins County Amphibian Migration Patrol, a citizen-science group led by Hedrick's graduate student Stephen Bredin, in outreach and volunteer coordination to save amphibians.
Last but not least, we have an ongoing field project that combines looking at animal personality and human infrastructure impacts. We capture behavior of wildlife, mostly deer, with video-enabled trail cameras, to see if they react differently to novel objects depending upon whether the animals live in small urban fragments or more remote forest habitat. Watch for random plastic flamingos (our novel object) in the woods!
If you interested in conducting research in my lab see details below: