I grew up in rural Illinois and the school district I attended lacked the resources to offer advanced STEM classes, but touring the coal power plants my father worked in and the annual “drive your tractor to school” days sparked my curiosity about how things work. This curiosity led me to chemical engineering, and I chose to attend the Missouri S&T based on its emphasis on design teams and student research as part of a well-rounded engineering education. 

During my undergraduate education, the professors that I found most engaging had all spent time working outside academia. Because of this, I chose to spend six years working for L’Oreal USA, first as an engineer in consumer goods manufacturing and then in supply chain engineering before starting graduate school. I earned a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from UNM and my dissertation research was utilizing mirror-image, left-handed DNA for robust computing in biological settings. I am currently a postdoctoral scholar at University of Washington in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering.