I am a plant development biologist interested in the cellular and molecular mechanisms that plants use to pattern themselves and from specialized structures. During my Ph.D., I worked with Dr. Dominique Bergmann at Stanford University in California, studying cell polarity and stomata development in Arabidopsis. My thesis focused on how cell polarity is controlled in the stomatal lineage and how changes in cell polarity alter the developmental progression of lineage stem cells. During my postdoc in Dr. Elena Kramer’s lab at Harvard University, I was attracted to nectaries and started to investigate the cellular and molecular dynamics behind nectary development in Aquilegia and Mimulus as well as the evolutionary history of nectaries in these lineages. At Berkeley, I am excited to dive deeper into the developmental mechanisms that govern nectary fate determination and differentiation as well as evolutionary history of nectaries in these two taxa. In addition, I am hoping to expand my research program on nectaries into other angiosperms lineages, such as Rosaceae and Tropaeolum plants.