Bio

My childhood was a giant science laboratory. Family vacations often revolved around field research stations and trips to fossil beds. I was conscripted into data collection by my limnologist father on a cloudless day around age 10, to hold a fiber optic cable really still about a foot above a white calibration pad, or the surface of water. It would be many years until these skills finally paid out and I understood what 'spectra' meant. 

I forged my own neuroscience curriculum at Creighton University from the psychology, biology, chemistry, and philosophy course offerings. I found my way into a brain trauma modeling laboratory with Cynthia Gibson, in search of neuroprotective compounds. These skills landed me a job assisting Mark Geyer and co. develop pharmacological models of sensori-motor gating and learning aspects of psychiatric disease at UCSD. 

Once a part of the amazing UCSD campus, I discovered the Cognitive Science graduate program and Jaime Pineda's Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, and the rest was psychohistory. I followed a path several UCSD neuroscientist had gone before me to the Veterans Health Administration's Northern California regional center for head trauma and neurobehavioral health in Marintez, CA. In Diane Swick's lab we tried to disentangle the effects of head trauma from those of post-traumatic stress using brainwave oscillations and network connectivity dynamics.

All this prepared me for a once in a lifetime opportunity to try to record and interpret dolphin brainwaves. 

To balance academics, I enjoy reading science fiction, making music, and am a professor of capoeira angola.

***Past Affiliations***

Assistant Professor of Behavioral Neuroscience - Dept of Psychology, Aurora University

Special Research Faculty - Lab for Multisensory Neuroscience, Neuroscience Institute, Carnegie Mellon University 

Postdoctoral Scholar - Auditory Neuroscience Lab, Biomedical Engineering, Boston University

Health Science Specialist - Cognitive Neuropsychology and Electrophysiology Lab, Veteran's Affairs, California North

Adjunct Professor - Dept of Psychology, Mills College

Lecturer - Dept of Psychology, Holy Names University

Adjunct Professor - Dept of Music, Chapman University

Graduate Research Assistant - Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, UCSD

Lecturer, Graduate Teaching Assistant - Cognitive Science Dept, UCSD

Undergraduate Research Assistant - Depts of Psychology & Biology, Creighton University