Olaf College in Northfield, MN. She earned a BA in biology and anthropology from Grinnell College, a Masters of Arts in Teaching at Washington University in St. Louis, and a Ph.D. in Evolution, Ecology, and Behavior at the University of Minnesota. She has taught English in China, biology at a private school in St. Louis, and integrated science at a charter school in Chicago. Her current research investigates geographic variation in milkweed plants, an important food source for monarch butterflies. She is coordinating a distributed research and education project involving educators and students repeating the same experiment at multiple institutions to better understand patterns of adaptation in milkweed.