About Me

It’s certainly not a conventional path, but discovery means breaking away from the conventional. if you look at the world the same way everyone else does, you just see the same things. Growing up in Alaska taught me to appreciate nature. Growing up in a fishing community taught me to be practical. Growing up around wily fishermen taught me to respect people for what they know and what they can do, not who they know and where they went to school. Or whether they even went to school at all. Growing up in a house full of art taught me to think creatively. Long ago I realized that I'll never be a great analytical, linear right-brain thinker, no matter how hard I try. But learning how to draw and how to cartoon... well, I can look at all the lines and see the picture they make.

For college, I wanted to get as far away from Kodiak as possible, which ended up taking me to Princeton. I spent the first year and a half taking humanities classes, reading Plato and Moby-Dick, and taking creative writing classes before my love of nature drew me to Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. But I remember that it was the humanities classes that really taught me to think critically, in a way my science classes never did. Under the patient and supportive mentorship of Rosemary Grant, I studied bird evolution, and after an internship at the Bird Division of the Smithsonian that saw me working on the weird ibis Xenicibis, I was hooked on paleontology. It was the collections that got me- wandering through endless rows of cabinets, drawers full of ivory-white skeletons, iridescent jeweled skins of tropical birds. It made me think that if there was a God, then he'd have a place like this... one of everything on file, for reference purposes.

Heaven, in my mind, looked like the Bird Division collections. Only larger.

After two years at Chicago, which turned out be a poor fit, I spent a few years in the wilderness, figuratively and often literally. This involved adventures from commercial halibut fishing on the fishing vessel Shuyak, to chasing lemurs through the leech-infested jungles of Madagascar, from art school classes in San Francisco to wandering across Patagonia with a copy of Voyage of the Beagle in my pack. I eventually found what I needed in Canada: vast, bone-rich badlands, endless drawers of fossils, a supportive doctoral advisor.