 She completed her bachelor's degree at Stanford University and then worked as a laboratory researcher at MIT for a year before coming to the University of Michigan to work in my research group. Laura is an environmental scientist and she's developed new methods for studying the very unusual behavior of the element mercury, which is a heavy metal pollutant and a very powerful neurotoxin. I worked in a lab for a little bit and started doing my own research and found that I kept coming back to the same names and the same people and then, you know, met with my advisor here Joel and really liked him, really liked his research. All the other people I talked to said he was top of his field and doing really exciting stuff and then he's was just getting into the research that I've been working on which is a brand new sort of novel application and knew it was just really exciting and very interesting research and so I decided that it would be a really good fit. It's always more work the first couple years than you think it's going to be but it's been nice to, I've found that it's nice to bounce ideas off other people in my research group and really like get quick. It goes more quickly than I thought it would, this sort of coming up with new ideas and moving in new directions. So I'm in earth and environmental science which generally everywhere I've been is very nice department, very supportive. It's the it's not competitive. The other, you know, grad students and professors basically help everyone out. Everyone's very sort of just bouncing ideas around and working together. I think it's a very, you know, winning this Procrest Distinguished Dissertation Award is sort of the icing on the cake that I would never have expected but is very nice to, you know, have someone else acknowledge my accomplishment.