Christina was raised in Coastal Mississippi. Her educational background is in physical anthropology, with special interest in forensic anthropology and bioarchaeology. She completed her undergraduate at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she interned at the Forensic Anthropology Research Center and the Historical Archaeology Lab. She continued her education at Mississippi State University, where she completed the master's program in Bioarchaeology. Her graduate research focused on the diagnosis and contextual analysis of a collection of executed adults and children from Late Medieval Mongolia. Following graduate school, she obtained a position as an Archaeological Crew Chief and Bioarchaeological Consultant in New Orleans, LA. Her archaeological endeavors allowed her to explore many parts of the country and its territories.
Christina transitioned away from fieldwork and to lab work. She completed post-bacc education at the University of New Orleans and obtained a position as a lab technician in Dr. QiQi Zhou's lab at Tulane University School of Medicine. She worked at a lab technician for 2 years, during which she gained valuable experience in mouse colony management, animal experiment design and experimentation. She additionally managed the IACUC protocol and played a key role in collaboration with IACUC and Tulane's Department of Comparative Medicine in the planning and coordination of animal use and experiments, with the shared goal of performing experiments ethically and with compassion.
In the Elde Lab, she assists with the management of the mouse colony and the retroCHIMP3 project. In her free time, she enjoys reading, hiking, back country camping, and working on fiber & textile projects.
evolutionary genetics & cell biology