My early publications addressed the role of protein phosphatase 2A (PP2A) regulation of cell signaling pathways and the role of natriuretic peptide receptor-B (NPR-B) signaling in wound healing and scar tissue formation from my graduate and postdoctoral work at UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. From 2007-2014 I was employed in the private biotechnology industry in San Diego, California. During this period, I worked within the algal biofuels space at Sapphire Energy generating new methods and tools for algal strain development and engineering to produce new forms of fuel. My topics of research at Synthetic Genomics expanded this work and included metabolic engineering, strain evolution, and development of novel biocontainment systems for GMO production strains. I then spent time at Dart Neuroscience where I learned high-throughput protein expression and crystallographic methods. In 2015 I returned to academic research and resumed work in the field of synthetic biology and genetic circuit design. Since then I have worked to build synthetic microbiomes and biosensors, developed new methods for strain generation and screening, helped to characterize a novel toxin-producing pathway in harmful algal blooms and participated in international collaborations to further work on new DNA assembly systems and algal biofuel engineering research.