Ronnie earned her B.Sc. in Ecology, Animal Behavior, and Evolution from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD, 2013). For her M.Sc. research (2015), she collaborated with the San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research to study niche partitioning in two species of rock iguanas in the Dominican Republic. At UCSB, she shifted her focus to study feeding competition among several species of primates. She developed a new method of measuring competitive pressure and its effects on red-tailed monkeys (Cercopithecus ascanius) for her M.A. (2021), and has broadened her research to include various biomarkers of energetics and geospatial analysis to look at the effects of competition on physcial condition and reproduction for the remainder of her dissertation.