I am a Project Archaeologist at Cultural Resource Consultants and a PhD. Candidate in the archaeology program at the Department of Anthropology, University of Washington. I am currently serving as the chair of the Association for Washington Archaeology (AWA) Grants and Scholarships Committee where, among other things, I run the AWA Microgrant Program. In the past, I have been a Student Director-at-Large, Vice President, and the Chair of the Diversity Committee for the AWA. I completed my dissertation fieldwork in 2019 and am now working on analyzing the results and writing up my dissertation.
My interest in archaeology began pretty much randomly. I started as an undergraduate English major at the University of Florida in 2003, hoping to make a career in creative writing and science fiction. After taking an anthropology course on pseudoscience and archaeology, I first double-majored in Anthropology and English, and then dropped the English major to focus solely on Anthropology. After taking a field school in the St. Johns river region of Florida, I decided to focus on archaeology.
After graduating, I worked for three years in Cultural Resource Management, while continuing my education, both formally and informally. I pursued an interest in spatial analysis, survey technologies, and Geographic Information Systems by enrolling in an online, year-long GIS certificate program through the University of Washington. A year after completing my certificate, I applied for and was accepted into the archaeology program at the University of Washington, where I initially planned to specialize in the historical and colonial archaeology of Indonesia. As that research did not pan out, I have shifted to developing a project on the archaeology of racism, labor, and race formation in the Pacific Northwest.