I am a postdoctoral research fellow in the lab of Yana Kamberov in the Dept. of Genetics at Penn's Perelman School of Medicine. I received a B.S. with honors in Biological Anthropology from The George Washington University and completed my Ph.D. in Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University under the guidance of Terence Capellini and Jenna Galloway. For my dissertation, I focused on identifying the molecular mechanisms that control tendon growth, and how evolution may have shaped the growth process to yield the highly variable tendon morphology observed among extant primates. My postdoctoral research focuses on investigating the molecular pathways and cellular mechanisms that underlie the development and evolution of ectodermal appendages, including eccrine sweat glands and hair follicles.