I was born in Medford, Massachusetts and spent my youth and college years in and around the greater Boston area. After graduating from Merrimack College with a BA in Biology in 1974, I moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin to pursue graduate studies in cell biology at Marquette University where I earned a MS degree in 1977 and completed my PhD in 1982. During the time that I was working for my PhD, I followed my major professor and her husband to Johnson City where they were both founding faculty members of a then new medical school at East Tennessee State University. Having completed informal post-doctoral work in what was then the Department of Biochemistry in the early 1980s, I have been extremely fortunate to rise through the academic ranks in the College of Medicine.
While I no longer maintain an active research laboratory, my research interests have primarily involved understanding mechanisms of meiosis in sexual and asexual species complexes of Poeciliidae, live-bearing fishes related to guppies. This work involved many collecting trips to Mexico to obtain specimens and to follow an interest in the evolutionary dynamics of asexual vertebrates. In addition to work related to meiotic mechanisms and evolution, we have also studied lithium toxicity and learning in poeciliid fishes; later, we developed an interest in the role of serotonin as it relates to neurodevelopment in zebra fishes.
I have been a long-time course director for multiple courses in the legacy preclinical
curriculum at Quillen including Cell & Tissue Biology, Genetics, and Case-oriented
Learning. I’ve also taught and directed courses in our biomedical graduate program.
In the new TRAILS curriculum, I will be the histology “content expert” contributing
to many of the preclinical block courses. I will also be the director for the PBL
component of TRAILS. My outside interests include “wasting time” at the seashore,
reading, listening to classical music, and spending time with family – including two
new grand babies. I have enjoyed spelunking, rappelling, hiking, and surf fishing
and I’ve been an active volunteer, building houses in Kingsport and Johnson City with
Habitat for Humanity.