My husband, kids, and I live on a small hobby farm in Trumansburg where we raise Nigerian Dwarf goats, a variety of chickens, Indian peafowl, and house a couple of retired Cornell vet school Göttingen minipigs. We also have two ridiculously silly cats and a bearded dragon. I have worked at Cornell since 2011 as a laboratory technician. Before starting here in Animal Science as the department safety representative and the manager of Dr. Mike Van Amburgh’s dairy cattle nutrition lab, I managed a transgenic zebrafish facility in the Neuroscience Department for Dr. Joe Fetcho. And my first ever research-related job was also here at Cornell way back in 2001 when I was still a high school student. I moved here for the summer to work as a temporary lab technician for Dr. Nelson Hairston in the Ecology Department. My grandfathers were both scientists: one a geologist, Dr. Odell McGuire, at Washington and Lee University where I grew up in Virginia, and the other an Ecology professor, Dr. Dick Root, here at Cornell. Through them and my father, who is an avid outdoorsman, I developed a deep love of nature, animals, and science, and decided to pursue a career in biology. I graduated from Wells College and spent some time teaching science at the middle and high school levels before ultimately returning to my happy place, the research laboratory. My extended family founded the Grassroots Festival of Music and Dance in Trumansburg, so I also have a deep love of music, art, and culture born from a long line of world-traveling musicians and music lovers (though I am not a musician myself). I am grateful to have landed here in the Animal Science Department, and look forward to expanding my knowledge of farming beyond my own backyard.
