I grew up on a farm in northwest Iowa, attended Iowa State University, then Princeton. Field-biology experiences along the way convinced me to become an academic whose research tends to be directly tied to natural history observations. I've been a professor at LSU since 2002. I'm broadly interested in organismal biology and community ecology. My own work has been heavily oriented toward community-assembly mechanisms in high-diversity plant communities, but my students and other collaborators have helped me enjoy thinking about other questions as well.