I grew up in Jersey City, a dense and diverse city in the New York Metropolitan area. As an undergraduate, I majored in physics at Union College in Schenectady (skuh-NECK-ta-dee), NY with an eye towards pursuing graduate education in astronomy/astrophysics. To this end, I decided to attend Penn State. However, I was never able to find my place in pure astronomy research. I loved learning about the topics and teaching and doing whatever outreach I could, but actual astronomical research was not for me. After meeting a now colleague of mine at an outreach workshop at the 2014 Winter Meeting of the American Astronomical Society, I came back to Penn State with the determination to conduct education research as an Astronomy & Astrophysics Ph.D. student. This also came around a time when my interest promoting equity in science was on the rise, thanks in large part to Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Dr. John Johnson, Dr. Mallory Molina, and all of the brilliant presenters at the 2015 Inclusive Astronomy conference, which I was fortunate enough to attend.
For various personal reasons, I ultimately decided to leave Astronomy with a Master’s degree rather than finish the Ph.D., but also completed an M.Ed. in Curriculum & Instruction thanks to the extensive number of education classes I took as part of my transition into education research. After a year of not particularly fruitful job searching, I was offered my current position at Texas State, where I have taught since Fall 2018.
My personal interests are overwhelmingly nerdy. I enjoy games of all flavors, books (primarily science fiction, fantasy, anti-colonialist history, and psychology), bad movies, Medieval style sword fighting, cosplay, and heavy metal, among much more.