I grew up in Northern Kentucky and attended Northern Kentucky University as an undergraduate student. During this time, I worked at the Wood Hudson Cancer Research Laboratory with Dr. Bonnie Richmond and later in the lab of Dr. Patrick Schultheis at Northern Kentucky University. I graduated with two BS degrees in 2007 (in Biological Sciences and Chemistry). My PhD training was with Todd Graham at Vanderbilt University where I worked on mechanics of phospholipid "flippases", graduating in 2013. I completed my postdoctoral training with Tom Rapoport at Harvard Medical School in 2017, working on mechanics of the the endoplasmic reticulum associated degradation system (ERAD). I started my lab at the University of Michigan Medical School in September 2017.

We are interested in the basic mechanisms of protein quality control systems at cellular membranes. We study how these systems select their substrates, and aim to identify the cellular pathways regulated by them. These processes are important in pathologies related to cell stress, protein misfolding, and protein misregulation. Human illnesses linked to these problems include Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and various cancers. Our longer-term goals are to understand how changing conditions in cells target substrate proteins to these integral-membrane quality control systems and exploit these systems to enable targeted protein degradation from cellular organelles.