I grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, but now I live in Ames, Iowa. Both are great places to live, but I hope to move closer to GR eventually. I first became truly interested in science in high school chemistry class. Later, I found organic chemistry to be the most fun, and this interest spread to biochemistry and math (BS double major). I decided to continue my exploration and get an MS in chemistry, during which I studied a family of DNA polymerases that are recruited to replicate past lesions in the DNA. After that, I still wanted more time to study, so here I am at Iowa State in a great bioinformatics and computational biology PhD program. I want my life to be about exploration of STEM, and my favorite set of tools is Julia.