Born in Amarillo, Texas and raised in the West Virginia town of New Haven on the banks of the Ohio River, I became interested in the natural world at a relatively young age.  While always being somewhat of a naturalist throughout childhood, my exposure to evolutionary theory did not come until college. 

While attending Marshall University, I began working in the lab of Dr. Victor Fet.  During my time as an undergraduate, I worked on the systematics of the European scorpion genus Euscorpius Thorell, 1876.  I continued in Dr. Fet’s lab and attained my master’s degree for discovering novel microanaomical structures and developing their usefulness in scorpion systematic research.

To further my training, I enrolled at East Carolina University after being accepted as a Ph.D. student by Dr. Jason Bond.  Currently, I am working on the high-level systematics of the millipedes (Arthropoda: Myriapoda: Diplopoda) using a combination of molecular data from both the mitochondrial and nuclear genomes.  By sequencing compete mitochondrial genomes and full transcriptomes from the breadth of millipede diversity, we hope to shed light on the ambiguous relationships between the major diplopod groups using an unprecedented amount of data for this class.  Concomitantly, the data I am collected may be used to address many questions concerning this mega-diverse yet poorly studied group of arthropods.