A native of Washington DC, I grew up on the Virginia side of the Potomac and attended the University of Virginia, where I earned my Bachelor of Science in Chemistry. I went on to earn my Ph.D. in Biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. I held two junior faculty positions at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center and the Emory University School of Medicine before leaving primary research to earn Georgia state certification in secondary education and teach high school science. In 2012 I joined the faculty at Georgia Gwinnett College.

My career interests have centered around science in many different forms, from primary research involving animal and cell culture models of lipid metabolism to clinical research on diabetes and cardiovascular disease, then to secondary education in chemistry, biology, environmental science, and engineering, to my current endeavors in undergraduate chemistry and biology education, secondary biology teacher certification preparation, digital learning, and education research in the science of teaching and learning.