Dr. Martha Burford Reiskind received her BA from the University of California Berkeley in 1995 (Go Bears!), where she studied insular botany in the South Pacific. She moved to San Francisco State University to complete a MA, studying the population genetics of the blue rockfish with Dr. Ralph Larson (Go Gators!). For a PhD, she studied speciation in pacific rockfish at the University of California, Santa Cruz (Go Slugs!) with Drs. Giacomo Bernardi and Mark Carr (2007). She then moved on to a post-doc working on the evolutionary ecology of the eastern oyster with Dr. Matt Hare at Cornell University and Dr. John Scarpa at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute. Since then she has held faculty positions at the University of Central Oklahoma and NCSU. She currently teaches and conducts research at NCSU and is the director of the Genetics & Genomics Scholars Graduate program in the Genetics & Genomics Academy. She loves to spend as much time under or on the water as possible, balances her time in the field with time in the lab, and in her spare time loves to garden, bake sourdough bread, go on collection adventures with her three kids, manage the Meredith Wood’s Bees in her front yard, and play the cello!

ORCiD: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6826-9215