I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Entomology in the lab of Laura Harrington, with an expected dissertation defense date of March 25th, 2019. I am broadly interested in entomology, ecology, behavior, global health. One of my favorite roles as a PhD student has been to mentor and teach undergraduates and others in our laboratory, and I hope to have similar experiences after graduate school. For my dissertation, I focused on the timing of reproductive events in Aedes aegypti, the mosquito vector of dengue, chikungunya, Zika, and yellow fever. Understanding when certain reproductive processes occur is critical to understanding how (mechanistically) they occur and is the first step to discovering reproductive processes that could be manipulated in the field to control the mosquitoes. One of my favorite aspects of research is the opportunity to generate creative solutions for difficult problems, and I have developed several new assays to study mosquito reproduction. In the future, I hope to use this innovative problem-solving to develop better ways to control mosquitoes and fight the diseases they transmit.