Biography

For my undergraduate education, I attended Michigan State University starting in 1985.  There, I began to study biochemistry, but soon became very interested in the workings of the brain, specifically those processes that allowed us to think, remember, feel, be happy, and be sad; That is, processes of the mind.  I took every psychology class I could and graduated with BS degrees in both biochemistry and psychology.  In 1990, I continued to study the mind and brain in graduate school at New York University under the mentorship of Joe LeDoux.  Joe’s lab is devoted to understanding how the brain mediates Emotions, such as fear.  After earning my Ph. D. in 1997, I continued to do research at the University of Colorado at Boulder, in the lab of Steven Maier.  There I studied how the brain mediates Learned Helplessness; a set of behavioral changes which occur after experience with an uncontrollable stressor.  These behavioral changes are profound and very similar to the symptoms of clinical depression.  Throughout all of my education, I have taken time to teach and mentor students whenever possible, and by 2002, I realized that my passion stood with teaching and it was time to put my research on hold.  At that time, I moved to the Seattle area, got married, and have been teaching psychology courses at many of the community colleges in the area ever since.  In the end, I have become very interested in many fields related to psychology and neuroscience such as philosophy, spirituality and religion .  I believe that key insights can come from studying the brain and hope to focus more on these related topics in the future.