I am the daughter of German immigrants, and speak fluent German as a result. I learned to program in high school, and decided to become a computer science major. After one year at Ohio State University, I took a programming job in Tallhassee, with the State, Department of Labor. I worked and concurrently took classes, working on my undergraduate degree in computer science. I advanced professionally at the Department of Labor during the six years that I worked there. I particularly enjoyed working with the clients in determining their automation needs, and doing the analysis and design. I successfully analyzed, designed and supervised the programming of a three-staff year project, which was delivered on-time- unheard of in most government circles. Alas, the job was beginning to bore me by now. I took a job at Blue Cross/Shield thinking that working with new tools would revive my enthusiasm as a computer professional. But again, after the learning curve, I was still bored. While at this position I took a graduate software engineering class (UNF). I loved it. It wasn't so rigidly structured as my undergraduate classes. It allowed me to explore areas within SE that I felt were interesting.
I took a position with the Information Resource Commission(IRC) developing policy for large-scale software development, but given the lack of training funds, any policy making was futile. During this time, I finished my course work for the MS in computer Science at FSU and began my work for my master's thesis. I so much enjoyed my thesis work, that I resigned from the IRC and took a teaching assistantship at FSU. I completed my thesis in one more year and took an instructor position with the University of Maryland's European division, teaching in Berlin during the "fall of the wall". This was tremendous for me, because I am a political person with particular interest in foreign policy. I originally went to better keep tabs on my Grandmother, because my Grandfather had died that year.
I came back to FSU to continue my work with relational mathematics, psychology, fuzzy set theory, and urbanistics, which I did for two years. In order to broaden my research scope, I switched to computational microbiology. My present work involves developing an effective object-oriented representation for RNA secondary structure. I am using this representation in a heuristic folding/alignment algorithm to illustrate its utility.
I have recently accepted a position with Plymouth State College in New Hampshire beginning Fall semester, 1996.
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