Hello, my name is Billie.

I am a new Gilliam Postdoctoral Fellow in Sarah Kocher’s lab at University of California, Berkeley. I study the neural substrates underlying evolution of prosocial behavior. Before that, I got my PhD in 2026 where my thesis focused on the evolution of neural circuits driving parent-offspring communication in amphibians, and the evolution of keystone neural cell types across vertebrates broadly.

I am fundamentally interested in how animals evolve new traits and adapt across multiple contexts in a constantly changing world. More specifically, my research interests focus on how we can harness well-established and emerging model organisms to understand the conserved neural substrates underlying sociality.