Kristen graduated from Claremont McKenna College in 2017 with her B.A. in Chemistry and Spanish. As an undergraduate, she worked with Dr. Babak Sanii studying configurable lipid membrane gradients to quantify diffusion, phase separations, and binding densities. She also worked with Dr. Paul Hergenrother in the summer of 2016, exploring the physicochemical properties that contribute to antibiotic resistance in E. coli. In the fall of 2017, Kristen joined the Hergenrother lab as a Roger Adams Fellow, where she is now aiming to find a way to convert certain Gram-positive antibiotics into broad-spectrum antibacterials.