I fell in love with biological anthropology the first semester of my freshman year at UC Berkeley in an Introduction to Biological Anthropology class, and have been hooked ever since. I went on to complete my BA with double majors in Integrative Biology and Anthropology, and spent my undergraduate research time working on a range of projects involving the skeletal remains of early hominins and ancient anatomically modern humans with Dr. Gary Richards at the Human Evolution Research Center. My first passion prior to my undergraduate career was the human brain, and I was fortunate enough to unite my love of the brain and hominin evolution with a graduate education in comparative neuroanatomy at UC San Diego, where I study under Dr. Katerina Semendeferi in the Laboratory of Human Comparative Neuroanatomy in the Anthropology department. My research interests lie in the evolution of the social brain, and seek to elucidate the neural correlates for the socio-emotional behavior and cognitive processing involved in social relationships that define human uniqueness. My current projects involve comparative histology with postmortem neural tissue of human subjects with Williams Syndrome, a rare neurodevelopmental disorder caused by a known genetic deletion and is accompanied by a unique social phenotype. I am specifically interested in how certain regions of the brain, including the frontal cortex and related subcortical structures, which are critical to complex social behaviors such as empathy, are altered in Williams Syndrome. Such research aims, in conjunction with the known specificity of the Williams Syndrome genotype, will help to shed light on the relationship between the genetic and neuroanatomical changes that were critical to the evolution of social behaviors that allowed humans to navigate an increasingly complex social environment.