I am the Lead Teacher of Science & Technology at Mendham High School in Mendham, New Jersey. I am also a Trustee and volunteer educator at the Schiff Nature Preserve in Mendham, where I have helped to design, fund, and lead innovative environmental education programs for local teenagers. My passion is the outdoors, and teaching environmental science gives me the opportunity to instill an appreciation of nature in my students. My proudest achievements are when I can inspire my students to devote themselves to further study and even careers in the environment.

I have a B.A. from Vassar College and an M.S. in Geology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. For my M.S. thesis I spent two summers mapping the rocks in Central Park in New York City and created the first large-scale geologic map of the Park. After graduate school I began my career as an environmental consultant, but I soon went back to school at night to earn a J.D. from the Pace University School of Law. After four years of environmental consulting and night school, I began a new career as an environmental lawyer.

Legal work was fascinating and allowed me to learn a tremendous amount about our government, the business world, and environmental science but it left me unsatisfied. At the same time, I began working in my community, volunteering in my daughter’s school, organize our local science fair, and helping out with youth sports and scouting trips. I realized that what I enjoyed was teaching and working with kids. So, after a 13-year legal career, I gave up my job at the international powerhouse law firm Latham & Watkins and became a high-school teacher.

As a teacher I enjoy creating meaningful lessons and experiential learning opportunities, both for my students and myself. I have published and given presentations at state educator meetings on lessons I’ve created to teach complex environmental topics such as carbon cap-and-trade regulation, human population dynamics, and trophic cascade relationships. I’ve also continued to further my own environmental education by winning an Earthwatch Fellowship to study caterpillars in the cloud forest of Ecuador in 2009, and by participating in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Teachers-at-Sea program in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, during the BP oil spill.

I am thrilled to be selected as a Department of Education Teaching Ambassador Fellow and I’m looking forward to promoting the dialogue on education policy in my community, with the Department of Education, and beyond.