For the most part, I followed a typical career path. I entered La Salle University in Philadelphia as a pre-med major planning to attend medical school. However, after I did my first summer research internship at USAMRICD studying the effects of nerve agents on the central nervous system to beef up my med school application, I realized that I loved collecting data to answer questions that do not have answers. With this in mind, I took the GRE instead of the MCAT and applied to graduate school instead. I entered the Interdepartmental Graduate Program in Neuroscience at the University of Rochester and starting working on neurite outgrowth in the laboratory of Dr. Roman Giger. My research in the Giger lab introduced me to a number of research topics and many different techniques, but in the end, the bulk of my thesis work examined long-term potentiation in mutant mice. This work peaked my curiosity in how the synapse, the business end of the neuron, communicates with the nucleus in the cell body so I decided to look more closely at the molecular mechanism of axonal transport for my post-doctoral research under the mentorship of Dr. Thomas Schwarz at Boston Children’s Hospital/ Harvard Medical School. At this time, I decided to switch my model organism from mice to fruit flies for two main reasons. First, I wanted to use a system that was more tractable to in vivo analysis and second I wanted to utilize a system that would be easier to establish at a teaching focused undergraduate institution. Similar to my graduate experience, my research in the Schwarz lab allowed me to investigate multiple avenues related to transport, which led me to establish a novel imaging paradigm in order to better understand mitochondrial motility in neurons.

What classes will you teach in the fall? Which class are you most excited to teach?