When I first started college, I was in a math education program, but by the end of my first year, I knew that education was not for me. How ever, I wasn't sure where to turn. I didn't enjoy math for the beauty of it so I knew that pure math wasn't my calling. I was much more interested in how math could be used to solve real world problems. I started taking biology classes since biology had been my second favorite class in high school after math. In an ecology class, the professor told me about an entirely new area of math that I never knew existed-mathematical ecology. After completing my B.S. in Math/Environmental Science, a degree program I created at Taylor University, I found the mathematical ecology graduate program at the University of Tennessee and was accepted. I was a teaching assistant for one semester for each of my first four years in graduate school. I have spent the rest of my time in graduate school as a research assistant for a project called ATLSS.

ATLSS stands for Across Trophic Level System Simulation. This project creates a computer simulation of the South Florida Everglades ecosystem. ATLSS is currently part of the Central and Southern Florida Comprehensive Study Review with the goal of aiding plans for major changes to the hydrologic control systems over the next 30 years. This project demonstrates one of the newer areas of math ecology. It is a multi-model, i.e., a series of models linked together.