Colorado State University

I graduated from CU Boulder with a bachelor's in Chemistry in 2013. Unsure of what to do, I went to Nicaragua to teach English for a few months. Upon returning to Colorado, I moved to Cincinnati to work as an HPLC Chemist at Proctor and Gamble. Not only did I miss my friends, family, and the mountains, so I returned to Colorado after a year.

Without any plans, I applied to CU Denver's Urban Teacher program to obtain my teacher licensure. Simultaneously, I was awarded a full scholarship through the Robert Noyce Foundation. With the scholarship funds, I spent a summer at Biosphere 2 in Tucson, Arizona studying soil chemistry and how the concentration of ions changes in watersheds depending on the amount of rain. 

After awarded my licensure in secondary science education and my M.Ed., I taught at Arvada Senior High School for the next 7 years. I predominately taught chemistry: conceptual chemistry, general chemistry, honors chemistry, AP Chemistry, and Concurrent Enrollment Chemistry through Red Rocks Community College. (During COVID, I obtained a Master's in Chemistry from South Dakota State with an emphasis on Chemical Education). 

Over the course of 7 years at Arvada High School, the dynamics the school changed. The school transitioned a Title 1 and the school curriculum transitioned towards Project Based Learning. I designed various units in chemistry around real world problems to help ground the students with the classroom content.

After the pandemic ended, I joined the freshman science team to help with the creation of a PBL gided0-inquiry Physical Science Course that encompassed the content knowledge and science skills that many of the freshman were lacking. In the class, the students made and sold soap, created enclosed biomes to study the nitrogen cycle, and built mouse trap cars. Simultaneously, Foster K-8, a bilingual community school, was ready to send their eighth graders to high school and I was elected to teach Ciencia Fisica- Physical Science but in Spanish. I taught Ciencia Fisica for two years, which was the only high school dual-language science course in Jeffco.

After 7 years of teaching and all the duties that go with it (including coaching cross country for four years), I was ready for a change. My husband and I moved to Loveland in October 2023 and I was lucky enough to find a job at CSU working with informal science education and outreach.