Botany Ph.D. Student

I am currently a first-year Botany Ph.D. student at the California Botanic Garden (Claremont Graduate University), studying the systematics and conservation of the western sessile Trillium clade.

I moved to southern California from Syracuse, NY in 2017 after completing my Bachelor's degree in Biology at SUNY Oswego. I worked with the Palos Verdes Peninsula Land Conservancy for a short time, and then with the California Botanic Garden (previously Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden) for a year and a half. These jobs introduced me to the California native flora, and gave me a solid foundation in field work, plant identification, and seed banking. I began my graduate education at the California Botanic Garden in September 2019. For my master's, I did a floristic inventory of the Manter and Salmon Creek watersheds, located in the southern Sierra Nevada.

I am currently the president of Southern California Botanists, the incoming president of the Society of Herbarium Curator's Early Career Section, and I am the student representative on the American Society of Plant Taxonomist’s Public Policy Committee.

My interests lie in conservation, botanical field work, science communication, natural history collections, and public policy.