About Me

I am an NSF PRFB Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Minnesota in Agronomy and Plant Genetics. I am co-advised by Candice Hirsch, Aaron Lorenz, and David Tillman on a project exploring the genomics of grass-legume interactions. My research interests focus on how we can leverage evolution and natural systems to develop crops and cropping systems that require fewer nutrient inputs and are more climate resilient while maintaining yield.

My PhD was in Plant Breeding and Genetics in Ed Buckler's lab at Cornell University where I was an NSF GRFP fellow. My dissertation research involved understanding maize intraspecific competition dynamics, devleoping a machine learning pipeline to evaluate gene model annotations, and identifying the genetics underlying perenniality using phylogenetic mixed models and comparative genomics with several hundred Andropogoneae species.

During my undergraduate work at Iowa State University, I studied inbreeding depression in wild teosinte populations and root architecture across the genus Zea.