I am passionate about teaching and connecting with my students and hope to incorporate research into their college experience. As a first-generation college graduate, I relate strongly to disadvantaged students and feel that I can effectively combine inclusiveness with high expectations in my teaching practices. My primary research interest is testis development in the field of reproductive biology. In humans, infertility affects twenty percent of all couples and half of cases result from male infertility. Furthermore, twenty-five percent of male infertility cases are determined to be idiopathic, or unexplained. My research goal is to further investigate and characterize the basic biology of testis development in the mouse using primary cells and cell culture models.