She graduated with her B.S. in Biology from Rhodes College in 1999. For her dissertation research, she studied the effects of herbivory and competition in water lily communities as a NSF IGERT Fellow, earning her Ph.D. in Biological Sciences in 2004. In 2005, she began working as a post-doctoral ecologist with Dr. Karen McKee at the USGS National Wetlands Research Center (now the USGS Wetland and Aquatic Research Center) to explore biological controls on marsh elevation dynamics in a changing world. In 2006, she joined the faculty at the University of Alabama. Her current research interests include understanding the mechanisms by which tidal marshes can adapt to, or mitigate the effects of, climate change.