WISP

I grew up in North Haven, Connecticut, a town just north of New Haven. In my free time I like to swim and play tennis. I also enjoy taking pictures of both living and nonliving things. After graduating from North Haven High School, I went to college at Brandeis Univerity in Waltham, Massachusetts where I majored in biology. I graduated in the spring of 2004 with a B.S. in biology and a minor in secondary education.

I enjoy studying genetics and evolution because I like solving puzzles. I am also fascinated by all the order and organization that exists even though on the surface life seems so chaotic. I became interested in sceince in high school when I first learned about how the many different elements on the planet all have a similar structure. This structure was the microscopic world of the atom. Science was interesting to me in high school, but I didn't decide that I wanted to study science until I got to college. I took many different classes in college and decided that biology intrigued me the most.

Research Interests

Currently, I am studying for a master's degree in biology at UMass Boston. I am working on my master's thesis in Dr. Rick Kesseli's laboratory where we study plant genomics. We are studying and characterizing species within the Compositae (Asteraceae) family of flowering plants. There are more than 20,000 species within the Compositae family, some of which are economically important crop species, invasive species, and species which produce a great amount of plant oil. Specifically, I am working with two species within this plant family: lettuce and sun flower. My thesis project involves investigating three groups of genes present in lettuce and sunflower genomes to see if these genes have remained in the same order since these two species began evolving separate from each other. When genes have remained in the same order throughout evolution, this is known as synteny.