In the spring of 2010, Emily earned her BS from the University of Tennessee in landlocked Knoxville, USA. She was lucky enough to complete two National Science Foundation internships, one in Costa Rica and one in Bermuda, where she was integrated into the international scientific community and found her love for marine science. Subsequently, in the fall of 2010, she moved to KAUST as a Lab Manager for the Integrative Systems Biology lab, where she worked for three years on varied research topics, including sponge microbiology, proteomics, and microsatellite development.

Emily joined the Reef Ecology Lab in 2013 and collaborated with Dr. Pablo Saenz-Agudelo on a project that explored the population genetics and connectivity of Stylissa carteri, a sponge common to the Red Sea. Emily graduated from KAUST in 2014. She is broadly interested in the evolution of multicellularity, prokaryotic-eukaryotic symbiosis, and the movement ecology of sessile organisms; hence, she finds sponges to be the most amazing animals on the planet!