About your teacher

I spent my early years living in Iowa, Michigan, California and Massachusetts before we finally settled in Florida, where I attended elementary school during court mandated desegregation.  See if you can find me in my third grade class photo.  After fifth grade, we moved to Maryland, where I lived through high school.  I was an avid skateboarder throughout middle school.  High school passions included math, band and technical theater.

I went to college at the University of Michigan and graduated with a degree in electrical engineering.  While in college, I had the opportunity to do research with Emmett Leith, inventor of the most common type of hologram that you can see without a laser.  This led to a job where I helped develop a system to make holograms that could portray natural colors using film or computer generated images as well as security images that were harder to duplicate, like the Mastercard hologram. I also worked with a small team of engineers to produce the National Geographic cover of the exploding Earth in the late 1980's. 

In 2002, the Denver Museum of Nature & Science gave me the opportunity to manage a fossil excavation in Castle Rock, Colorado, where we found the world's oldest (modern) rain forest.  We eventually excavated more than 10,000 fossil leaves and changed the way that scientists thought about ecosystem recovery following the mass-extinction that occurred at the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) boundary. 

During this period of my life, I dove into the study of ancient climates and ecosystems, which has become relevant today as we seek to understand the impact of Earth's changing climate.  I also was the lead author of a reference book on leaf morphology and I had the privilege of living on a boat while doing research in the Amazon rain forest.  I loved the opportunity to DO science, and until I lived it, I didn't really understand how being a scientist was different from what I had done in school science classes...

Working at the museum gave me the opportunity to interact with a wide variety of school groups (from Kindergarten through college-aged) and these interactions led to my latest passion...  After nearly a decade of work as a paleobotanist, and multiple publications, I went back to school at CU for a teaching license. 

I've been working at Bear Creek since 2010 and have had the privilege of teaching 4th grade, 5th grade and Kindergarten.  I finished a Master's Degree in Education 2015 and continue to enjoy teaching, learning and honing my craft. I am delighted that we are back in person and able to go on field trips again!  I have found that my students continued to learn at a steady pace throughout the pandemic (and the other challenges that have impacted our community) but they have missed out on many of the social aspects of school. This will continue to be a focus for this school year.