I have been studying molecular biology and microbiology in a laboratory setting for over six years and I just defended my master's thesis at Oregon State University on the altered community composition of coral reef symbiont communities under heat and nutrient stress. My thesis involved complex time series data and a challenging amount of variables, and I greatly enjoyed parsing out features of the dataset that may be explained by different community interactions. I completed an undergraduate thesis at New Mexico State University on the effects of chronic stress on neural FoxP2 expression and blood corticosterone levels in budgerigars. I also spent a year at Oregon State University in a lab that dealt with coinfection of viral and bacterial pathogens in the lungs, specifically Streptococcus pneumonieae and the influenza A virus, and how these pathogens could lead to increased virulence via direct interaction within a host. I have had the chance to develop skills in microscopy, cell culture, PCR, genomic sample prep for Illumina sequencing, bioinformatic analysis, and statistical analysis in R.