I first met Emma at The University of Chicago around when she was finishing her PhD journey and as I was just about to begin mine. Emma was the kind of impossibly cool scientist I wanted to be like: she was so incredibly smart, genuinely funny, and disarmingly down to earth. We became true friends only some years later when I helped to TA the desert ecology summer field course that Emma had made into a long-term study population after she took up residency at the Lab of Ornithology. Emma let me tag along on her pre-dawn routine of catching verdins in their elaborately constructed nests and taught me how to band. We bonded over the birds, our love of the desert, Chicago gossip, and laughing about the various eccentricities of our students.

After I moved to Ithaca in 2019, Emma became one of my dearest friends. In so many ways, Emma helped make Ithaca feel like home. I’d catch a ride to the Lab with Emma most mornings and in the afternoons we would steal away together for lunch. Most often we would get something quick at Ithaca Bakery - Emma had price optimized a specific egg and cheese on a bagel order - but we would go for a sushi lunch if we really wanted to treat ourselves and had tea to spill. Over the long winter months and warm summer days we would have so much fun doing movie nights at my place or board game nights at hers. We especially loved playing Codenames, Sushi Go, and the New Yorker cartoon caption game. Emma made the best pizzas from-scratch and could whip up a delicious apple tart with her eyes closed. Whenever I made popcorn, she would insist on enjoying any lingering nutritional yeast at the bottom of the bowl after all the kernels had been eaten. "We shouldn't waste any yeast!" she would say. I can still hear all of the laughter we’d share together.

Our friendship was forged in the crucible of both good times and bad. Over the course of my two years in Ithaca we each went through agonizing breakups, found peace in being single, and then met and fell in love with our respective partners. I will be forever grateful that I had in Emma a friend to share these moments with. She was so wise, so caring, and so big of heart. And she used these traits generously. Everyone who knew Emma knows how special she could make them feel. It gave me so much joy to see Emma and Krishna fall in love and for her to become a mother to Veda.

Simply put, Emma was one of my favorite people. She remains that impossibly cool person I aspire to be like. I grieve for the loss of my dear friend and for her family and loved ones whose pain is incomparable. There are no words sufficient for expressing the sadness I feel. I miss my friend Emma terribly.

After each of our kids was born, Emma always signed up for the MealTrain to bring her signature lasagna, which was such a lifeline during those hard initial months. I'm also glad our families saw other through the daycare that our older child attended with Veda. Emma was a generous, funny, brilliant person who influenced me more than she will know. I grieve for Krishna, Veda, and the rest of her family. Please call on us and the rest of the community for anything you need.

I’ve been remembering little things about all the wonderful things that came with being in Emma’s orbit and hearing her thoughts and hilarious ideas. Emma’s little cousin (or some other little human in her life) taught her that when she doesn’t want to say sorry, she moves her arms like she’s doing the wave breakdance move and says “soooorrryyy” sarcastically. Emma loved this so much and showed me in our shared office as soon as she got back from visiting that kiddo. Some time later, she was guest lecturing in Mike Webster’s animal communication class, and she got to class late. She told the origin story to her class and did the sorry wave. I was in the classroom laughing hysterically  and it was the first time I ever saw so many college kids laugh so genuinely with a lecturer they just met.

When my daughter Lua was 3 or 4 and started getting sassy AF, we taught her the sorry wave and sent a video to Emma. She still uses it often  

I remember another time that Emma made me laugh out loud. She was giving a presentation on her research at a international conference, and she put up a powerpoint slide where there was a graph where two lines crossed. She advanced the slide and she had drawn on the graph and turned the two lines turned into a cartoon shark. I thought this was HILARIOUS. It showed that Emma never let things get too serious or boring, even data graphs during a conference presentation. I think she was the first influence I had in science who was just so totally genuine and authentic. That made her an amazing science communicator, and a great mentor and teacher, in addition to being an excellent researcher. She cared about what mattered. She was the person who you could always count on to be kind, open, and inviting in any setting. She was also the friend who would skip out on work or conference talks with you to go sneak into a hotel pool, or go to a reindeer petting zoo. Emma knew how to live and she helped me to learn too. She was one of the raddest people I’ve ever met, and I miss her so much already.