I am a behavioral and evolutionary ecologist with a focus on animal behavior, cognition, and visual signals. My experience spans from invertebrate to vertebrate systems and I am interested in anti-predator adaptations, the ecology of fear as well as sleep in previously unstudied organisms. My focus on natural history has recently led to the discovery of a REM sleep-like state in spiders with strong parallels to REM sleep in mammals and birds challenging existing views on the origin and evolution of this behavioral state. I use interdisciplinary and integrative approaches in both the laboratory and the field using neural network-based video tracking methods to validate and quantify behavioral data.