She recently completed her Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, and her dissertation investigated intercultural interaction and colonial encounters across the Upper Great Lakes region of North America. She has extensive teaching, research, and cultural resource management experience in the Midwest, and she most recently worked for the Mississippi Valley Archaeology Center in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Her interest in archaeology first took root during her undergraduate field school excavating a 9th century AD town site in the Czech Republic, where she learned that she loved the outdoor fieldwork, camping, and camaraderie often involved in archaeology. However, as her mother would attest, Heather was destined to be an archaeologist since childhood, when playing in the dirt and conducting messy “science experiments” in the kitchen were some of her favorite pastimes.