Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, spending my time fishing and hiking while searching for critters, I developed a curiosity for the unseen interplay between an organism’s environment and how it interacts with it.

In 2013, I graduated with a B.S. in Ecology and a B.S. in Biology from Seattle Pacific University. During my bachelor’s, I studied in a naturalist’s dreamland such as the Salish Sea, Amazon Rainforest, and the Galapagos Archipelago. It was while working with Dr. Ryan Ferrer, studying the chemically guided interactions of marine invertebrates, that I began to hone my research interests and develop my goals to pursue a career in academia.

Despite my eagerness to begin a career in research, my journey to graduate school took a “non-linear” path. A few years between undergrad and graduate school afforded me the opportunity to further refine my interests and learn new skills. During this time I was a barista pouring latte art at a bakery and worked the canning line at a craft brewery all while still trying to keep my toes in science. On the side, I worked in a zebrafish facility, taught coral reef ecology in Belize, and assisted with a study of elephant behavior - all while applying to graduate school year after year. In 2016, someone finally took a chance on me and I was awarded the Graduate Student Fellowship at the University of Florida.

In 2022, I received my PhD in Zoology from UF where I conducted research at the Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience in the lab of Dr. James Liao. My dissertation revealed the mechanisms and evolution of of sensory feedback and signal transduction of hair cells in the lateral line system of fishes.

Currently, I am a Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) postdoctoral fellow in the sensorimotor integration brain & body integration lab (SIBBIL) of Dr. Claire Wyart at the Paris Brain Institute (ICM) where I am working to understand the integration of sensory information to recruit motor neurons within command circuits in the hindbrain that select behavioral respones.