Growing up in Bastrop, Texas, I loved to follow the weather. My grandmother was a National Weather Service Cooperative Observer, I watched The Weather Channel every morning before school, and my mom would find me outside during storms at night, photographing lightning. In high school, my dad helped me set up a rain gauge network across my hometown for a science fair project.

I couldn't wait to get to the University of Oklahoma to study meteorology. During college, I spent a year interning at National Weather Service headquarters in Washington, D.C., and landed a student job at the Oklahoma Mesonet not long after it launched in 1994 — a dream job. I became Mesonet Manager in 2001 and earned my Ph.D. in meteorology in 2007 under Dr. Kenneth Crawford. In 2024, I became Director of the Oklahoma Climatological Survey and joined the OU School of Meteorology as a Full Professor.