I grew up in a small town in southwest Michigan and majored in biology at Central Michigan University, where I did research on all sorts of plankton in all sorts of Michigan lakes. After finishing my Bachelor's degree I attended Western Michigan University to obtain my Master's in biology, where my thesis was focused on insect communities of interdunal wetlands on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. After that I accepted a position at Texas A&M University - Corpus Christi to lead the field and lab component of a large project looking at insects and fish in streams along the coastal bend of Texas. In 2022 I'm excited to start a position at the University of Kansas looking at fairy and tadpole shrimp of ephemeral wetlands across the central United States.
Although my education and career has involved photography in some aspect (usually on a microscope), I never picked it up separately as a hobby until toward the end of my Master's degree (summer of 2019). Since then I have fallen in love with wildlife, macro, and landscape photography and indirectly associated hobbies like birding and dragonfly hunting.