About

I am from Wooster, Ohio, a small city nestled among rolling hills of beautiful agricultural land. Home to both the College of Wooster—with a very international student body—and Ohio State’s Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center (OARDC), Wooster enjoys an unusually robust food culture, with thriving year-round farmers’ markets and food cooperatives and a plethora of locally-owned restaurants, butchers, breweries and distilleries.

This gastronomic background, combined with my family’s love of traveling and food, our several years living abroad in Mexico, Chile, and England, and my mother’s constant baking projects planted the seeds of a lifelong interest in cooking, baking, and eating; I am never happier than when I am undertaking a slightly overambitious cooking project, preferably one that requires either eggs or excessive salt and a fun knife.

In high school, I lived in Puebla, Mexico for a year due to my parents’ jobs. In the interest of brevity I will skip the details, but one highlight was the International Baccalaureate program which requires an independent research project. I took the opportunity to explore genetics—a topic that had long interested me in an abstract way—and did a small PCR project under the tutelage of Drs. Lyn Loveless and Dean Fraga, both in the biology department at the College of Wooster. I enjoyed the project so much that I joined Dr. David Francis’s tomato lab that summer as an intern. I loved the work we did but was also very excited about other research, so over the course of the next several years during my bachelors at Oberlin College I was a serial intern, working in labs studying everything from marsupial embryonic development to freshwater flocculent sediment (floc).

After college I took two years off from higher education to explore career options. I decided my most engaging and fulfilling research experience had still been my time in tomato breeding, so when I decided to pursue my doctorate I applied primarily to breeding programs. I found that the labs I was most interested in weren’t necessarily breeders, but rather the army of geneticists, statisticians, programmers, and other support scientists who make their efforts possible. Thus, I ended up at North Carolina State University in a wheat genotyping lab, where I have happily been playing with too much data while shaping myself into a geneticist with a strong computational skill-set.