Biography and Research statement: I earned my B.S. and M.Sc. from Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, OH (Go Falcons!). From there, I moved to Northwestern University for my dissertation work, which focused on defining the developmental function of DISC1, a schizophrenia susceptibility gene. In 2009, I started my postdoc work at Oregon Health & Science University in the lab of Alex Nechiporuk. In the Nechiporuk lab, I developed protocols to analyze intracellular transport in zebrafish sensory neurons and started our screen for regulators of retrograde axonal transport.
At the University of Wisconsin, my lab uses forward and reverse genetics, in vivo imaging, and protein interaction studies in zebrafish neurons and cultured human cells to study neuronal cell biology. Currently, we are focused on two key questions: 1) How do neurons maintain their mitochondrial populations, particularly at the synapse? and 2) How does the single Cytoplasmic dynein retrograde motor attach to and move various cargos in neurons with spatial and temporal precision.