I’ve been studying tardigrades since I was 15 years old, for nearly twenty years. My goal is to help inspire and enable others to bring tardigrades as a uniquely useful model system into their lab (or classroom). Tardigrades are in their own phylum, and the over 1,500 species of tardigrades described to date have remarkable morphological and behavioral complexity, especially for an organism of their microscopic size. Think of tardigrades as C. elegans, but better. Throughout the years, tardigrades and I have shared many adventures together including research ventures in McMurdo Station (Antartica), the Great Smokey Mountains (TN, USA), Berkeley (CA, USA), Rehovot (Israel), and Stuttgart (Germany).

I graduated from MIT in 2012 (Biology & Philosophy), have a MA in Teaching (having worked as a 7th Grade Science teacher in the NYC Dept. of Education for 2 years), and a Ph.D. in Integrative Biology and Computational Biology from UC Berkeley (‘22), with a dissertation on the topic of “Mechanisms of cold tolerance in tardigrades.” Linkedin and Google Scholar