Senior Research Associate and Adjunct Professor of Plant Breeding & Genetics at Cornell University. Received her BS in Biology at Virginia Tech in 1997 and was a Research Technician studying the alkaloid biosynthetic pathway in tobacco in Dr. Michael Timko’s lab at the University of Virginia until 1999. Received her PhD in Plant Biology in 2006 in Dr. Thomas Brutnell’s lab at Cornell University studying light signaling pathways in maize. In 2006 she was awarded a USDA postdoctoral fellowship to study meiotic mutants and homologous pairing in maize in Dr. Wojtek Pawlowki’s lab. In 2008, she joined Dr. Edward Buckler’s lab as a Research Associate creating genomic tools for biofuel grasses and positionally cloning a maize plant height QTL. In 2009, she became a Project Manager and Research Associate at Nature Source Improved Plants until 2019, where she worked directly with mid- and large-sized commercial seed companies on optimizing breeding pipelines spanning 12 crops. Today, she is the Director of Breeding Insight, a USDA-ARS-funded initiative hosted at Cornell currently supporting 24 specialty crops and 3 animal breeding programs in the adoption of new tools, technologies, and software since its inception in 2019. Her current research interests include the expansion of genomic tools to non-model species, particularly complex polyploids, democratizing access to technology, and breeding to improve nutritional and food sustainability in the face of climate change. NAPB member.