I earned a bachelor’s degree in Integrative Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. I taught high school biology in Richmond, California for 4 years, and then earned a master’s degree from NYU in Physical Anthropology with Susan Antón and Todd Disotell. I continued my graduate studies with Günter Wagner in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University, and earned my PhD in 2012. In my dissertation project I studied the transformation of two transposable elements into a derived uterine prolactin promoter in primates, making gains in our understanding of how new regulatory elements arise in genomes and the role of transposable elements in this process. I moved to the Yale School of Medicine to do my postdoctoral work with James Noonan in the Department of Genetics. In 2013 I obtained an NIH NRSA fellowship to support my postdoctoral work, with the goal of learning functional and computational genomics techniques to study regulatory evolution at a global scale. In my latest project I have been working to elucidate the role and mechanisms of regulatory innovation in the emergence of the mammalian neocortex.