I am an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Tennessee. I received my Bachelors degree in Animal Behavior from Bucknell University in 1994 and my PhD in Biological Psychology from the University of Georgia in 1999. In graduate school my research focus was on aggression, dominance relationships, and reconciliation in Assamese macaques. After graduation I became a post-doc at Mysore University in India where I extended my research on primate socioecology to bonnet macaques. In 2002, I joined Dr. Kim Huhman's lab as a post-doc at Georgia State University and began studying neurobiological mechanisms controlling dominance relationships and social defeat stress in Syrian hamsters. Although I miss the monkeys, the research with hamsters has provided a wonderful opportunity to study the neural mechanisms controlling complex social behavior!