I’m from Green Bay, Wisconsin—a place best known for its industrial history and its football team, and not so much for biomedical research. In fact, the world of academic research was completely unknown to me until my second year of college.

One of the most formative moments for me was taking general genetics at the University of Wisconsin. That’s where I met my future mentor, Chris Hittinger, who introduced me to yeast genomics and evolution—and showed me that research could be a real career path.

After earning my degree in evolutionary biology, I moved to New York to pursue my PhD with Jef Boeke. There, I deepened my training in genetics and synthetic biology, with a focus on chromatin biology and chromosome segregation.

I’m now an MSCA Postdoctoral Fellow with Andrea Musacchio at the Max Planck Institute in Dortmund (strangely, also known for its industrial history and Fußball team), where I investigate the atomic structure of native kinetochore assemblies.

Going forward, I aim to blend evolutionary and comparative perspectives with genetics and biochemistry to answer fundamental questions about how eukaryotes maintain their genomes—and how these systems evolved.

My CV (PDF)