Lily grew up in Mariposa, a small town bordering Yosemite National Park, and received her BA in Biopsychology from Mills College (2015) as a Faculty Scholarship recipient. During her time as an undergraduate, she was secretary of the National Society for Collegiate Scholars and a Teaching Assistant for Fundamentals of Psychology and Ethics. She also interned at San Quentin State Prison where she led a restorative justice group circle focusing on trauma and grief. Lily was awarded a research fellowship and spent the summer after graduation studying the social behaviors and genetics of California ground squirrels. Working as a Clinical Research Coordinator over the next few years, she provided crisis counseling to veterans with comorbid PTSD and alcohol use disorder at UCSF, and following her research, she was fortunate enough to co-author an article in the Journal of Alcoholism. Outside of the lab, Lily tutored students with learning disabilities and volunteered at a children’s summer camp teaching art and dance classes. Lily is thrilled to have found a field that merges her love for patient care, genetics, and ethics. She spent the past two years shadowing and interviewing genetic counselors in various specialties and collaborated this year with a genetic counseling student on her research thesis as a second coder. She is especially interested in patient advocacy, ethical considerations in genetic counseling, neurogenetics, and psychiatric genetics. For fun, Lily enjoys dancing, fashion, and spending time outdoors.
