I completed the undergraduate liberal arts curriculum at Davidson College and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Biology. Following graduation I completed four years of work at Children’s Hospital Boston in the Hematology and Oncology Department as a Research Technician investigating genetic disorders of iron metabolism in a mouse model system.

After my time at Children’s Hospital, I enrolled in a graduate program at Boston University. After six years, I received my PhD in Molecular Biology, Cellular Biology and Biochemistry. My PhD research focused on developing a novel methodology for fluorescently detecting unmodified RNAs in living E. coli cells.

Concurrently, I was engaged as a Teaching Fellow for courses in Microbiology, Physiology, Molecular Biology, Cellular Biology and Biochemistry. As a Teaching Fellow I instructed and tutored engineering students who easily absorbed Mathematics, but struggled with the life sciences. Working with these students was challenging, but success in motivating and helping them overcome learning barriers to succeed academically was my favorite part of the job and personally very gratifying. I now believe that teaching students how to push through any intellectual roadblocks and overcome learning difficulties can be more important than teaching the subject matter alone. When I am not in the classroom or lab, I spend my time playing water polo or life guarding, surfing and fishing the beaches of Nantucket.