My arrival as a scientist hasn’t been the most linear process, but I believe I’m all the more stronger for it (I originally mistyped ‘stranger’ there – perhaps also true).

I grew up in rural Pennsylvania not too far from the city of Philadelphia. I loved exploring nature as a child and would often spend hours each day in the forest and fields close to my family’s farm.

I was interested in both science and technology and I thought I wanted to be either an engineer or medical doctor. I chose to go to Virginia Tech for my undergraduate schooling because I had a choice to study either discipline. For the first couple of years I could not find my way and was uninspired by my coursework – truthfully, I had a hard time connecting my coursework to a future career.

During my junior year I was required to take undergraduate research credits. A sophomore year instructor gave me a list of faculty who she viewed in high regard. One of the names on the list was Orson K. Miller – Professor of Fungi. That summer when I was making my decision I found that my family owned a copy of Miller’s “Mushrooms of North America”. My choice was made. I devised a project studying the host-specificity of Pine trees with a group of fungi in the genus Suillus. After working in the laboratory and having experiments I could “own” I immediately had purpose and started to excel in my courses.

I received a MS degree from University of Wyoming studying the molecular evolution of the genus Lactarius and co-evolution with hardwood trees.

After my Master’s degree I worked in Portland, Oregon, for four years with a position at the US Forest Service as a Forest Mycologist and then studying Plant-Insect interactions and microbes as biocontrol agents. I also was an adjunct instructor at Portland Community College during this time.

I was starting to get restless in my position and felt that my upward mobility was hindered. I also found myself downloading and reading new science journal articles in my spare time. I knew I needed to go back to school and get a PhD this time. After a lot of great offers from various universities, I chose to attend Penn State – It was here that I studied plant-microbe interactions and bioinformatics. I was lucky to have numerous fellowships from the Huck Institute and USDA to pursue microbial genomics.

After receiving some grant funding, I was a visiting researcher in Francis Martin’s laboratory at INRA in Nancy, France, in 2010. In 2011, I was a visiting scholar at Chonnam National University in Chonnam, South Korea. During this time I embraced the new sequencing technologies that were starting to become available. I worked as a post-doctoral scholar at Penn State after earning my degree.

I began a non-tenure track faculty position in 2013 at Michigan State University with the goal of expanding my computer programming and data analysis knowledge. For the past five years, I’ve been devoted to expanding my scientific, computational, and data analysis knowledge while also doing the same for others.

In August of 2015 I began as an Assistant Professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the Department of Plant Pathology with a joint appointment in the Center for Plant Science Innovation.