I began astronomical research as an undergraduate at the University of Colorado with Drs. Alexander Brown and Thomas Ayres, where I characterized the evolution of million-degree gas during stellar flares.

Subsequently, I received my Ph.D. at the University of Maryland, College Park. I first worked with Prof. Andrew Harris on detecting high density molecular gas near the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. I then worked with Prof. Christopher Reynolds for my Ph.D. thesis, which studied the interaction of relativistic jets of plasma from supermassive black holes with the hot gas.

I was a postdoc and then a research scientist at the University of Michigan, working with Prof. Joel Bregman on the hot gas around normal spiral galaxies and with Prof. Elena Gallo on populations of massive black holes in the local universe.

In 2018 I came to NASA/GSFC, where I am working on the JAXA/NASA X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM), the ESA/NASA Athena mission, and research regarding how gas gets into and out of galaxies.