About me
Howdy. I’m a ecologist that studies the evolution and ecology of microbial endosymbioses. I was raised in the formerly small and rural town of Sherman, TX. In grade school, I became interested in evolution, but at the time, my biology teacher refused to teach what they believed to be “just a theory”.
After graduating high school, I attended the University of Texas at Arlington to receive a more formal education in biology. During my time there, I joined the Mydlarz Coral Immunity Lab, which was my first introduction to microbial endosymbioses. There, I worked on multiple projects that involved manipulating a coral’s immune system and examining both the coral’s and their endosymbiont’s responses through biochemical assays and transcriptomics. This experience led me to pursue a Ph.D. in Ecology at the Pennsylvania State University.
At the Pennsylvania State University, I completed my Ph. D. in Ecology in Todd LaJeunesse’s Symbiosis Ecology and Evolution Lab. There, I studied the effects of host identity and life history in structuring host-symbiont combinations across Indo-Pacific reefs, describing nine new species of dinoflagellate symbionts that associate with highly abundant hard and soft corals. My final chapter involved examining changes in the transcriptomes of two species of symbionts across different “host habitats”. In May 2025, I successfully defended my dissertation, and formally graduated in August 2025.
Today, I am a postdoctoral researcher in both the Fuess Symbioimmunity and González-Pech Microbial Symbiosis Labs at the Texas State University. Here, I am working to bridge the knowledge gap between marine and freshwater cnidarian-algal systems.
Wherever the future takes me, I hope to continue studying the evolution and ecology of microbial symbioses. While my interests have remained largely in cnidarian-algal endosymbioses, I am interested in branching out into other endosymbiotic systems and open to future collaborations.