A Kansas City native, I am happy to be back in Jayhawk territory! After graduating from Shawnee Mission East High School in 2000, I went on to pursue a Bachelor of Science degree in Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. At Wash U, I coupled my technical education with my interests in the humanities, eventually graduating with additional majors in Biology and Spanish, in 2004.
As an undergraduate, I received two Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) fellowships, which allowed me to conduct research on the Medical School campus. I worked in the lab of Brian Hackett, MD, PhD, in the Department of Pediatrics' Developmental Biology Unit, examining the genetic regulation of left/right axis formation and pulmonary epithelial cellular differentiation. I was also able to spend a semester working full-time at an industrial pharmaceutical company, where I assisted process engineers in designing a protein isolation protocol.
Currently I work in Dianne Durham's lab, examining the effects of cochlear ablation on brainstem neurons. I am excited to be a part of the MD/PhD Program at KUMC and thrilled to be working towards my dissertation in the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology.
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