I always liked science as a kid and was excited about science projects since elementary school. Whether it was taking frog eggs home to watch them hatch or in high school chemistry labs, I enjoyed putting the knowledge we learned in class into real-life applications. My passion for science and research really developed at university in a lab where I had patched my first cell. I recorded the membrane activity from a single cell using a glass electrode and a microscope. I was able to see it fire an action potential and see it change its response as I applied different channel blockers. From this experience, I decided to pursue a career in research. In my Ph.D., I worked with Dr. Peter Smith, where I looked at the spinal cord and how pain signals are integrated and sent to the brain. During chronic pain disease states, there is a permanent change in spinal neurons, thus they continue sending pain signals even when there is no longer any tissue damage. I was able to identify the chemical mediator that produced the chronic changes in these neurons. At the NIH, I studied G-protein coupled receptors and the mechanism by which they modulate the activity of neurons. We also developed molecular tools to study ion channel modulation in neurons. In my second post-doc, I continued this line of inquiry in cells that released gut hormones, and how their ion channels are modulated by different nutrients and metabolites. I applied these methods to study hormone-releasing cells in the intestine, the enteroendocrine cells, to understand how nutrient-sensing G-protein coupled receptors can alter the excitability of these cells.