I am an engineer, scientist, and artist.

My first encounter with the application of computer programming was the summer after my junior year in high school when I attended Governor's school for information technologies at Tennessee Tech and took a class in Visual Basic for excel macros along with classes in nanotechnology, engineering physics, and GIS. Because of this early exposure to engineering principles, I knew I wanted to pursue a technical field in college, so I applied for the engineering program at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and earned a Bachelor's in chemical engineering with a Biomolecular concentration. My time as an undergraduate taught me how to study hard and allowed me to focus on learning. My most valuable experiences were from group projects where I worked with students of varied backgrounds. Gaining a solid camaraderie with my classmates opened up conversations that allowed me to grow as an individual. I also learned valuable skills such as aseptic laboratory techniques and basic computer programming in MatLab as well as advanced math including calculus, differential equations, matrix computations, and statistics. These proficiencies and my background in biology have already aided me in the fundamental biology research I am currently participating in at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. While in school, I also gained industry experience through the Cooperative Education (Co-Op) Program where I obtained a position with DuPont Titanium Technologies, now known as The Chemours Company, within the research and development department. My projects during my Co-Op experience involved optimization of industrial-sized wash drums, lamella settlers, and distillation columns; new product research through small batch sized wet chemistry reactions; and control system graphical improvements in Aspen HYSYS software. While I continue to explore my research, I am enrolled in a Fundamentals of Digital Archaeology class which builds on the python skills I taught to myself while getting experience with tools like BeautifulSoup, MongoDB, R, mean.js, and caffe: a deep learning framework. The more I learn, the more I want to learn. I am excited about what the future holds as I continue down this path.