I was born in San Diego, California but grew up in Gainesville, Florida. After graduating high school in 2010, I went to Wesleyan University for college. While I had originally planned to work towards a degree in chemistry, after taking Introduction to Planetary Geology, I changed directions and double majored in both Earth Science and Chemistry. My senior thesis focused on the potential for liquid brines at the Martian surface. I then moved to Los Angeles for graduate school at Caltech in 2014, where I worked on data being returned from the Curiosity rover. Having defended my PhD in December of 2019, I am now working as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Colorado Boulder.