I am an associate professor of Mathematics at Pacific University, and have been a faculty member here since 2012. Prior to my appointment at Pacific, I was an assistant professor for two years at the University of Missouri – Kansas City. My Ph.D., which I earned in 2010 from the University of Iowa, is in Applied Mathematical and Computational Sciences. I graduated from Grinnell College in 2000 with a B.A. in Mathematics, and for a few years between college and graduate school was a high school and junior high school teacher in Minnesota as well as overseas. My scholarly interests lie primarily at the intersection of biology and mathematics, but I have been involved in a variety of applied mathematics investigations.