About Me

I grew up on a small farm in Clarksville, Tennessee.  Although I started college at the University of Tennessee at Martin, I transferred to the local college in my hometown, called Austin Peay State University, in my junior year.  While there, I was hired as a student worker to help the Professor of botany (study of plants).  My job was to hike around in woods, identifying and collecting plants.  After earning my Bachelor's of Science with a major in biology and a minor in agriculture, I worked at Auburn University as a lab technician, setting up the science lab classes.  Auburn has a highly respected veterinarian school and I was interested in a research project one of the professors was doing about endophytes (fungus) in grass that was causing horses to abort their fetuses. I volunteered to help and my job was to handle the foals that were successfully born to the mares.  This is when I discovered volunteering can often turn into something bigger after one of the foals was given to me. After leaving Auburn, I was accepted into a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Grant program in molecular biology at Vanderbilt University.  My Master's of Science degree was completed in 1999 with my published thesis "Efferent Fibers in the Optic Nerve of Bulla gouldiana." From 1997 until 2011, I taught in the Scottsdale Unified School District in Arizona. In 2005, I was selected to participate in a BBC sponsored documentary about the cause of the tsunami that happened in December of 2004 and assisted in discovering the uplift of the ocean floor off the Sumatran coast.  In 2007, one of the researchers invited me to go out on another research project off the coast of New Jersey to try an experimental sample collection method.  In 2014, I started teaching with The Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) at Vilseck High School in Bavaria in Germany, moved to Ramstein Airbase in 2019 for three years.  In the summer of 2022, I made the decision to move to The Villages to be closer to family.  My spouse and I live on a small farm with goats, chickens, donkeys and cows on the other side of the wall of the Villages.