About me
I grew up in rural Kansas near the Kansas-Oklahoma border. After finishing high school, I went to college at Kansas State University and got my BS in Psychological Sciences. I volunteered as an undergraduate research assistant with Dr. Charles Pickens' lab and worked on a project investigating the effect of sub-chronic ketamine exposure on behavioral flexibility in rats.
After college, I did a 2-year postbac fellowship at the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore, MD. I worked first with Dr. Shih-Chieh (CJ) Lin, then with Dr. Peter Rapp, both in the Laboratory of Behavioral Neuroscience. In CJ's lab, I studied reward prediction error signaling in the basal forebrain of mice, and in Peter's lab I studied age-related changes in sleep structure and dynamics using EEG.
From 2018 to 2024, I completed my PhD in Neuroscience at the University of Colorado, Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora, CO. I was co-mentored by Drs. Alon Poleg-Polsky and Gidon Felsen, and for my thesis project, I studied the neural circuitry that enables motor programming for saccadic eye movements to modify visual representations in the superior colliculus.
I did a short postdoc in my thesis lab after graduating, and I currently work as a biostatistician at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, UT.
Outside of work I like to read for fun (mostly sci-fi/fantasy), play volleyball, and spending time with my cat, Tachi.
