As an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I studied the roles of AMP kinase on cellular metabolism in the lab of Dr. Jay Brenman. My interest in neuroscience led me to pursue graduate research under the mentorship of Dr. Hugo Bellen’s at Baylor College of Medicine, where I used genetics and cell biology to dissect the metabolic changes that contribute to neurodegeneration. I found that lipid droplets consistently accumulate in glial cells prior to the onset of neurodegeneration in several neurodegenerative disease models and revealed the signaling cascade involved in this deleterious metabolic shift.