I am from the suburbs of Philadelphia and got my B.S. in food science from Cornell University in 2010. From 2010-2016 I got a Ph.D. in food science in the lab of Dr. Lee-Ann Jaykus at North Carolina State University. After some time as a postdoctoral researcher in the Jaykus lab, I worked as an ORISE postdoctoral fellow under the supervision of Jason Folster at the U.S. CDC from 2017-2018. I joined the Department of Food Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst as an Asisstant Professor in 2018.