I live in the Reno, Nevada area and work at the Desert Research Institute's Molecular Microbial Ecology Laboratory and University of Nevada - Reno's Laboratory for Ecological and Evolutionary Genetics as a technician. I have been working in environmental biology for approximately 10 years on projects ranging from detecting halocarbon pollutants in marine organisms to using molecular fingerprint analyses (microsatellites) in population genetics studies of the western toad. I have always had an affinity for marine science, especially deep-sea biology, and am enjoying learning about the diversity of microorganisms living in the deep sea, polar environments, and even Lake Tahoe. My role in GenEx² has been to extract RNA and DNA from Antarctica sea water samples for microarray analysis, following which I'll learn to perform microarray hybridizations with these samples.