Biography

About Me

I grew up in Rancho Cucamonga, California, about a half-hour east of Los Angeles, where I spent much of my time exploring the local museums and hiking trails. An early love for dinosaurs and paleontology was sparked by a bucket of toy dinosaurs given to me at Christmas when I was two years old, and that love was fostered by the nearby Raymond M. Alf Museum, Page Museum at Rancho La Brea, and Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. By the time I was in high school, I was volunteering daily for most of the school year at the Alf Museum and going out into the field with the museum each summer. While working at the Alf, I published my first research, a poster at the 2016 Society of Vertebrate Paleontology annual meeting, on the anatomy of a tyrannosaur specimen from the Kaiparowits Formation in southern Utah.

While working on an undergraduate degree in geosciences at the University of Arizona, I spent two summers interning at the Wyoming Dinosaur Center, where I fell in love with the Morrison Formation and its sauropods. Addtionally, I was able to conduct another research project using specimens from the WDC, analyzing shed teeth of Allosaurus in order to determine heterodonty in the genus. This research was presented as a poster at the 2020 SVP meeting, and is stil ongoing. The summer after my graduation from the University of Arizona, I also interned at The Mammoth Site of Hot Springs South Dakota, where I worked on the excavation, curation and preparation of pleistocene mammals. Additionally, I have worked as a volunteer at the Carter County Museum's Dino Shindig in Ekalaka, Montana.

When not studying paleontology, I spend my time reading, hiking and working on my landscape photography.