I've always been interested in understanding how living things work. I got hooked on microscopic life when I had the opportunity to volunteer in a microbiology lab at Oklahoma State University in high school. There, I watched, amazed, as a simple drop of bacteria in solution turned into a plate full of colonies, with thousands of individual cells, overnight!

During my undergraduate at Geneva College, I conducted microbiological research with Dr. David Essig. Under his tutelage, I learned how to conduct independent research projects, design scientific questions and experiments, analyze data, solve problems, and understand how my Christian faith impacts my research. In graduate school at Oregon State University, I studied in the lab of Dr. Steve Giovannoni, where I learned how to work with challenging microorganisms, persevere in the face of difficulties, and work on a team.

Currently, in my work as a postdoc at the University of Waikato, I'm taking my culturing skills to new and unexplored depths, studying subsurface microbes that inhabit Mt. Erebus, the southernmost active volcano in the world. My first project on Erebus, with collaborators across New Zealand and both sides of the US, sought to discover new microbes and metabolisms in one of the most extreme environments in the world. Our field work required braving the fierce environment of the Mt. Erebus summit to drill at multiple sites. We used cutting-edge and tried-and-true culturing techniques to culture the microbes living there, with the processing of these cultures still ongoing.

My newest project, which I will be the lead for, will involve return trips to Mt. Erebus to study the photosynthetic bacteria living there, combined with laboratory experiments with isolates from Erebus. We hope to understand how these photosynthetic bacteria survive four months of winter darkness every year on Erebus.