I have traveled a winding path to arrive at the Department of Health Informatics. I have always had a love for science, which started as informal learning as a child, usually expressed as catching frogs and other wildlife at our summer cabin on Lake Huron. I graduated with a Biology degree from Hope College, a small, pre-med liberal arts college in western Michigan. Although I was pre-med for several years, I decided that grad school was the place for me and picked pharmacology, because it explored the mysteries of the human body, yet had a large applied component.
Pharmacology encompasses physiology, biochemistry, pathology, and of course drugs.
Since I was interested in herbal medicine as a hobby, this field seemed to match my interests well. As a graduate Student at Michigan State University, I studied a parasite called Schistosoma mansoni . During this time of study, I found I was most interested in drugs that worked on the nervous system. Thus I moved in another direction, neuroscience. For my postdoctoral studies I was interested in the cellular events that make up learning and memory, and I studied a model organism called Aplysia californica .