I'm currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Minnesota in the Bernlohr laboratory. I was first bitten by the research bug as an undergraduate where I worked in chemistry laboratories in organic synthesis and characterization. My advanced coursework in biology and medicine led me to graduate school at the University of East Carolina's Master's program in Biomedical Science. It was there that I met who would eventually become my PhD advisor Dr. Ethan Anderson, and also where I grew to appreciate and begin to master analytical biochemistry. I started out simply indexing collagen content in human myocardial tissue, but my project grew into a story about a little-appreciated class of compounds called catecholaldehydes and how they might be affecting cardiac fibrosis. When my research advisor was offered a job at the University of Iowa, I followed him and became a PhD student at the University of Iowa College of Pharmacy. There, I mastered a diverse array of lab skills in molecular biology to uncover a novel role for catecholaldehydes in cardiac fibrosis in obesity/diabetes. As a postdoc, my project at the U of M interrogates the biochemistry and molecular biology behind cellular senescence, specifically in adipose during obesity- and age-associated insulin resistance. Adjusting to the burgeoning senescence field presents difficulties as the field's understanding of basic features such as the SASP evolves very quickly, but I've found meeting those challenges by mastering new methods to be a rewarding one. As demonstrated by my coauthorship on 10 publications (2 as the first author) and presentation at 5 (inter)national professional conferences, I'm adept in manuscript preparation, scientific writing, and scientific communication.