She has 30 years of professional experience as a curator, and has been active in state, regional, and national museum organizations. Her areas of interest are ornithology, collections management and conservation, and museology. She was previously Curator of Zoology at the Denver Museum of Natural History for 22 years. She hastens to add that she really enjoys the utter disregard for bureaucracy and more immediate creative gratification of working in a small museum in as vibrant a community as Homer. Alaskan curators do things differently.
Winter is the time for indoor work, summer for outdoors.
Between frequent wilderness forays in her boat, gillnetting for salmon to provision the family freezer, eradicating gargantuan cow parsnip in the pasture, and digging drainage trenches to keep the driveway navigable, she works at the museum. She can be found managing cultural and natural science collections and information, collecting oral histories of native people, fishermen and homesteaders, salvaging beached whales, and building an interactive multimedia collections database at the museum.