Originally from Morgantown, West Virginia, I received my BS in Biology from West Virginia University in 2021. It was here that, through my work on bacteria associated with tsetse flies, I was introduced to the study of endosymbiosis: cells living inside other cells. Shortly thereafter, I left for Arizona to work in John McCutcheon's lab where I study the Hodgkinia cicadicola endosymbionts of cicadas.

Broadly, I am interested in how compartments, genomes, and biomolecules representing phylogenetically distant lineages interact ina cell biological context. Specifically, I would like to understand how these intracellular interactions evolve in pathogens, host-beneficial endosymbionts, and organelles. Host-beneficial endosymbionts of insects have emerged as exciting study systems for understanding ways that unlike cellular components can evolve to function together. Some of these bacteria have experienced such extreme gene loss that they are predicted to rely on their host cells for construction of their membranes and even some components of their protein synthesis machinery. Advancements in microscopy and structural biology are increasingly enabling us to understand to address the cell biological puzzles and "who-dunnits" implied by the meager gene contents of these tiniest bacterial gnomes. (Check out this review for more on the subject!)

As much as I love trudging around with an insect net and conjuring up shell scripts in GNU Emacs, I was drawn to science less as a naturalist or as a computer geek and more as a reader, writer, and performer. My love for biology owes, I think, to its dual character as an empirical and an historical science. Yes, there are predictable population genetic processes and conserved molecular mechanisms, but our observations of these phenomena are not truly independent. They are all facets of larger stories: the shared "family history" of life on Earth and the contingent (and convergent) histories of individual lineages. This appreciation for both the molecular and the historical particulars has drawn me to some seriously "weird" systems, which illustrate how improbable outcomes in biology not only occur but have far-reaching and wide-ranging consequences.