About Me
I earned my Bachelor of Science in Forest Resources with a concentration in Wildlife Biology from the University of Georgia (UGA) in 2017. As an undergraduate student, I became interested in wildlife diseases and genomics which led me to be a laboratory manager specializing in microbiome sequencing at the Georgia Genomics and Bioinformatics Core (GGBC). After working at GGBC, I pursued my Master of Science in Environmental Health degree at UGA where I participated on projects looking at antimicrobial resistant microbes in healthcare settings and using long-read amplicon sequencing to detect pathogen variants within ticks. After graduating with my Master's in 2022, I was a fellow at the CDC for 2 years researching novel technologies to help detect and characterize pathogens causing healthcare-associated infections (HAIs).

Current Research Interests
After completing my fellowship in 2024, I began working as a microbiologist at the CDC furthering my research on HAI pathogens. I like to understand how microbes work and what mechanisms allow them to persist in certain environments - whether that be in healthcare settings or within patients themselves. This has led me to pursue my PhD in Biology at the Georgia Institute of Technology  and I am currently interested in investigating the genetics and heterogeneity of Pseudomonas aeruginosa within patients with chronic lung diseases.