About
My journey into the field of nutrition and exercise physiology has been on a bit of a winding road. I have always loved science from elementary through high school, but when I graduated and headed to Florida State University, I thought I wanted to be a marine biologist. I majored in biology and obtained a certificate in marine biology, while also competing on the Women's Track and Field team. Track and field was my love, and with two years of eligibility left, I stayed at FSU for a Master of Science degree in biology. This degree focused on fish population conservation and used a great deal of math, programming, and ecology to build models that predicted fish population behaviors. I spent my spare time helping biology professors in the field, sampling seagrass beds, tagging sharks, and surveying coastal plant communities. In an interesting turn of events, I was awarded a Navy Research Enterprise Internship with the Experimental Diving Unit after graduation. While I did have a background in SCUBA, the position as a laboratory technician in a physiology lab was quite different from the marine and coastal laboratory where I'd been working the last few years. Little did I know that the exposure I would get to exercise physiology at the Diving Unit would help shape my future. Once my internship was over, I stayed at the Experimental Diving Unit for a while longer as a Department of Defense contractor. It wasn't long before I decided to go back to school for my Ph.D., however, and I ended up at Texas A&M in a doctoral program in Wildlife and Fisheries Science. Used to involvement in athletics, I signed up as a volunteer assistant coach for the Track and Field teams there, working with the jumpers to help run practice and coach during meets. Working with athletes really clicked for me. Two years after my arrival at A&M, I switched my doctoral program to sport nutrition and exercise physiology and I haven't looked back!
Joined
October 2016
