I graduated from Indiana University Bloomington with a B.S. in Biology in 1991 and then graduated from the Department of Medical and Molecular Genetics at the Indiana School of Medicine in Indianapolis with a Ph.D. in 1998. I came to Claire Walczak’s lab in 2001 as a postdoctoral fellow and was promoted to Research Asst. Professor in 2005. My interests are in the biochemical mechanisms that regulate molecular motor proteins that affect cytoskeletal dynamics. I love applying diverse biochemical and biophysical approaches to answer fundamental questions about how cells assemble the mitotic spindle to properly segregate their chromosomes. I am also deeply interested in how protein structure coordinates biochemical activity of proteins.