After receiving a BA in visual art from University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, I worked in the non-profit sector at The Hetrick-Martin Institute. Before, during, and after college, I support myself by working in restaurants. I completed a PhD in Biology at Duke University in collaboration with the Amboseli Baboon Research Project. I completed Postdoctoral Fellowships at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) and at Indiana University as part of the NIH funded Common Themes in Reproductive Diversity research group. I am now growing my research group in the Biology Department at Texas A&M University. Our group is part of the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Interdisciplinary Doctoral Degree Program.