Tim's research is focused on understanding how and why we select behaviors in the context of complex natural environments.  His primary focus lies in the biological and cognitive underpinnings of temporally organized actions, such as vocal communication.

 

Tim received his B.S. from Penn State in 2014, where he investigated vocal-syntactic perceptual sensitivities in Cotton-Top Tamarins. Afterward, he worked with chimpanzees as a field ethologist at the Budongo Conservation Field Station in Uganda. In 2015, he returned to the US to work at the Applied Research Lab, where he developed neural network models of the auditory perceptual system.
 

Tim earned his Ph.D. at UC San Diego in 2021, focusing his thesis on the temporal structure and neural basis of sequential organization in vocal behavior, using the European starling as a model system. After graduation, Tim started a Schmidt Science Postdoctoral Fellowship working on the biological basis of natural behavior, where he uses computational and biological approaches to parse out sequential organization and understand how we choose actions in context.