I am an Associate Professor of Urban Ecology in the Zoology Department at Weber State University. Originally from Maryland, my studies took me to North Carolina, Virginia, and Missouri before settling in Utah. I started working at the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore as a high school student and continued on in many roles in outreach education and as a zookeeper through college. I attended the University of North Carolina Wilmington as an undergraduate to major in marine biology. After graduating, I immediately entered a master's program studying songbirds as biomonitors of mercury in a river system highly contaminated with mercury. And that was it--I was hooked on birds and toxicology. My biggest adventure came next, taking my field experience south, WAY south to the Antarctic where I used penguins to study mercury in the Antarctic marine food web for my PhD. Knowing I wanted an academic career at a primarily undergraduate institution, I returned to studying heavy metals in local ecosystems to involve students in my research as a post-doc and then assistant professor. As an assistant professor of wildlife toxicology at Southeast Missouri State University, I spent three years studying the effects of legacy lead contamination on songbirds in the southeastern Missouri Lead Belt. Eventually the heat and humidity got to me and it was time to move on to a higher and drier climate which brought me to Weber State University in 2018. Here, my primary research focuses on the cycling of mercury in the Great Salt Lake food web. Undergraduate student involvement is a focal part of my research here through which students work with me from hypothesis development to field collection, laboratory analysis, and ultimately gaining experience presenting in a professional setting.