Research Associate, Biorepository
I have always loved pets. When I was in elementary school, I was the student that volunteered to take classroom pets home during holiday breaks and over the summer. One time, my teacher even let me keep the guinea pig. My parents encouraged my love for animals and never told me no when another classroom cage came home on the bus with me.
I grew up in Denver and attended Colorado State University where I earned a degree in biology. I originally wanted to go to vet school but fell into biotech research after college. I worked as an Animal Lab Supervisor at a company in Boulder where we researched and developed human cancer treatments. After ten years, I was ready for the next thing.
When a job at the Flint Animal Cancer Center came up, I knew I wanted to work here. The team is fantastic and the research is like none other in the world. I have worked in the Biorepository Lab since 2013.
My job is facilitating sample collection for the bio bank and sharing samples with the principal investigators for their research. My favorite part of my job is spending time with our patients and meeting their owners.
Several years ago, my own dog, Ginger, was assessed and diagnosed with lung cancer by the fantastic staff at the FACC. She, unfortunately, was too far along in her diagnosis to receive life-saving treatment, but the palliative care was more than we could have asked for. Most notably, the support our whole family got at the Argus Center after her death was instrumental in our healing.
Outside of work, I’m married to my high school sweetheart, BJ. We have two kids, Elara and Logan. I am an avid runner and we enjoy spending time together as a family. We have two dogs – Lenny, our “COVID baby”, is a mixed-breed Pitty and Belgian Malinois cross that we all adore. Mave is a retired research Beagle dog that I fell in love with and adopted from work.