About me

I'd like to think I wear many hats: paleontologist, artist, writer, expert knitter, mediocre crocheter, brutalist architecture super fan, inadvertent source of a Japanese internet phenomenon, and a "worm girl." My research integrates aspects of marine and experimental biology, ichnology, CT analysis, and systematics to address questions not so easily answered in the context of deep time. In particular, I am interested in the origins of our modern, animal-dominated oceans, and the roles of ecosystem engineering by organisms such as priapulids and other marine worms thought to have evolved during or immediately prior to the Ediacaran-Cambrian transition ~550-538 million years ago.

I am currently an Earth and Environmental Sciences PhD candidate at Vanderbilt University, a Fulbright-funded visiting scientist at the Marine Research Department of Senckenberg am Meer in Wilhelmshaven, Germany, and a research associate at the Western Science Center in Hemet, California. I hold a bachelor's degree in Geology from the College of William & Mary and a master's in Earth and Environmental Sciences from Vanderbilt. I also have extensive collections experience, having worked in the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology Department of Vertebrate Paleontology, the American Museum of Natural History Division of Paleontology, the collections of the Waco Mammoth National Monument and Baylor University Mayborn Museum, and the Virginia Museum of Natural History's paleontology collections. Check out my CV here, my ResearchGate profile here, my art here, and my Twitter here.