About Me

I was born and raised in the Bay Area, near Starfleet headquarters, until I was 12 years old, when my parents moved to the backwater Class H desert planet of Cornville, Arizona. Although neither of my parents had attended Starfleet, I had always wanted to explore strange worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, and to boldly go where no one had gone before, so I decided to become a Starfleet cadet. I transferred to the tiny M-class planet of Yavapai College, and trained in the biological sciences under the tutelage of Captain Chris Breitmeyer and First Officer Jan Albright. For my birthday, they gave me the famous evo-devo manual, Endless Forms Most Beautiful, by Sean Carroll. I was entranced by the idea that animals were constructed from networks of genetic circuits. In theory, the genetic architecture of development could be tweaked to create designer animals, such as reproductively-hindered, K-selected tribbles. Of course, the experimental foundations had to be established before this could become reality. Therefore, upon earning my Associate of Arts from Starfleet, I transferred to the M-class planet the University of Arizona, where I majored in Molecular and Cellular Biology.

My first mission at University of Arizona was with Captain Lisa Nagy, of the USS Ilyanassa obsoleta. My mission was to determine whether the Hox gene post2, an orthologue of AbdB, played a role in the development and evolution of the mollusk shell, a morphological novelty. For my heroism at the University of Arizona, I was promoted to Lieutenant of Science, and transferred to my dream assignment on the major M-class planet, the University of California, Berkeley.

At Berkeley, I was Lieutenant of Hox Operations for two of the greatest Starfleet Officers of evo-devo, Captain Nipam Patel of the mighty USS Parhyale hawaiensis, decorated for his glorious battle against countless developmentally important genes in non-model arthropods; and Captain Mike Eisen, a pioneer of the latest transcriptomics-class starship USS Drosophila melanogaster and fearless crusader of Open Access science publishing. My first mission was to characterize the Hox gene network and appendage diversity in the crustacean Parhyale hawiensis. Unfortunately, my mission would not have been completed in time before my shuttlecraft had to return, so I switched to a different mission. Fortunately, my second mission was a great success! I discovered a proximal-distal coordinate system for aligning all arthropod legs, which provided a framework for answering long-standing questions about the origins and relationships of arthropod outgrowths like horns, helmets, gills, and stink glands.

When Captain Patel was promoted to Admiral of the M-class planet the Marine Biological Laboratory, I transferred along with him to continue my mission on arthropod legs. For my heroism on this important evo-devo mission, I was promoted to First Officer. 

I am now a new Assistant Captain on the M-class planet the University of British Columbia in the Canada quadrant, where I command a fleet of three emerging model species-class starships: the USS Parhyale, the USS Tribolium, and the USS Oxidus. With this fleet, my continuing mission is to explore the evolution of morphology and genetic networks over vast phylogenetic distances of half a billion years.