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. 

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.