I originally became interested in marine biology while growing up in Virginia Beach, VA. We were right at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, spending lots of time at the beach and hearing all about the oyster reefs and other estuarine creatures that made up the local ecosystems. I spent a few summers during high school working as a Lab Tech at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS), working on IDs of benthic invertebrates living on and off of oyster reefs and helped with the maintenance of the benthic invertebrate archive. I then attended Nova Southeastern University, double majoring in Marine Biology and Environmental Science. I bounced around a bit on the research front in undergrad, quantifying levels of corallivory on different coral morphologies in the Galapagos, a summer of field work with the Wild dolphin Project, and eventually a summer internship studying deep-sea coral communities on the West Florida Escarpment. I quickly fell in love with deep-sea research, and pursued a Masters in Marine Biology at College of Charleston, working on model validation of mesophotic corals in the northeast Gulf of Mexico. This work led me to my current position as a Ph.D. student at Temple University, where I am focusing on community ecology and spatial distributions of deep-sea coral communities in the southeast US waters and the Gulf of Mexico.