I grew up in Des Moines, Iowa and attended Iowa State University (Ames, IA) earned a B.S. Horticulture and a B. Landscape Architecture in 2007. I worked as a landscape architect in central Iowa and earned my professional license in 2011, which I still maintain. In 2012, I moved to Ithaca, NY to attend Cornell University for my Masters (’14) and Ph.D. (’18) in the lab of Jenny Kao-Kniffin. My master’s thesis was on the role of biodiversity on ecosystem function in urban grasslands – turfgrass landscapes. My Ph.D. dissertation was about the impacts of land-use legacy on shaping the composition of soil microbiomes in urban grasslands and included field research in the National Science Foundation’s Baltimore Ecosystem Long Term Ecological Research site.

In the fall of 2018, I returned to Iowa State University to join the Department of Horticulture as an assistant professor. I taught core undergraduate courses in woody plant identification; landscape plant installation, establishment, and management; plant propagation; and landscape construction. I started and became the lead investigator for the Sustainable Landscapes & Management (SLAM) lab. The SLAM Lab at ISU sought to integrate my research and teaching roles through the lens of my experience as a licensed landscape architect by bring real-world problems faced in the green industry to my lab group and students in order to both train the next generation of landscape professionals and to identify where the research community can interface with practitioners to address challenges beyond the scope of conventional practice. 

The SLAM Lab is now transitioning focus to return to the landscape architecture profession and translate research findings into evidence-based best practices for designing, establishing, and maintaining functional designed landscapes.