I am a Peter Buck Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Botany at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, working under the supervision of Eric Schuettpelz.

Grounded in systematic biology and natural history, my research deals with the biodiversity, evolution, biogeography, and ecology of symbiotic Ascomycota—a group of fungi that includes species from baker's yeast to bread mold, from the fungi that cause athlete's foot to the gray and green lichens on tree bark. My work focuses on two types of symbiotic interactions: lichenization (a stable association of a fungus and green alga or cyanobacterium) and endophytism (a fungus living asymptomatically inside plant leaf or lichen tissue).

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I completed a BA in Human Ecology from College of the Atlantic (COA; Bar Harbor, ME, USA) in 2016, where my botanical mentor was Nishanta Rajakaruna. I earned my PhD in Biology from Duke University (Durham, NC, USA) in 2024, where I was advised by François Lutzoni.