Family is important to me. I have been married to my wonderful husband, Fritz, for 22 years, and we have two sons, Wells and Freddie. Fritz, Wells, and I moved from Evanston, Illinois to South Burlington in 2010 so Fritz could take a job as a finance professor. Freddie arrived a few years later. After working in finance and consulting for 18 years, I took a break in 2013 to stay home with my children.  My favorite place to be is on the soccer sidelines watching the boys do what they love to do or on an adventure with my family.

After she retired from a long career in nursing, and my Illinois-based nieces launched into adulthood, my mother moved from Ilinois to Williston to be closer to her younger grandkids. She is my frequent (and very enthusiastic!) companion on the soccer and baseball sidelines.

My first job after graduating from college was as a financial analyst in the Healthcare Group at PaineWebber in New York City. I spent two and a half years at PaineWebber raising equity and debt capital and assisting with mergers and acquisitions transactions for healthcare services and biotech companies. 

After a couple of years, I moved on to a small private equity firm called Counsel Corporation that invested in healthcare and telecommunications companies. I worked for Counsel full-time before and after business school and part-time while in business school.

When my husband (at the time my fiancé) graduated from his business school program a year after I graduated from mine, he received a job offer to work in finance in London. We moved to London, and I spent a year doing freelance consulting while looking for a job in finance during the post-9/11 economic slowdown. When a headhunter mentioned an opportunity to work for an impact-driven private equity fund that had just been raised, it felt like the stars had aligned. The job at Bridges Fund Management offered the chance to use my finance skills to help invest in and grow businesses in economically struggling parts of England in the hopes of building lasting prosperity in those communities. Working at Bridges I felt, for the first time, like I could fully be myself at work. My colleagues cared as much about making a positive impact in people's lives as they did about making a return for investors, and they valued that combination of attributes in others. 

Eventually we returned to the US so my husband could pursue a Ph.D. As we made the transition, one of the founders of Bridges connected me with the founders of ShoreBank (now part of Providence Bank & Trust), and I went to work for a spinoff of the bank called SB Partners. SB Partners was a small private equity fund that invested in women- and minority-owned businesses. I worked with portfolio companies in the restaurant and pharmacy sectors to build their businesses for two years. 

When SB Partners decided not to raise a second fund, I transitioned to ShoreBank International ("SBI", now part of Palladium). SBI was a consulting company founded by ShoreBank to work with impact-driven financial institutions in developing countries to expand access to capital for micro-, small-, and medium-sized enterprises and affordable housing developers with the ultimate goal of increasing economic opportunity and access to housing for underserved communities around the world. For several years I worked with clients in Asia and Africa to raise capital and assess new strategic opportunities to expand their reach and impact.

After the birth of my first child, I continued to work for SBI, first in the Chicago office and then remotely from Vermont. When my second child was born, for a number of reasons I felt it was time to take a career pause and focus on my family. I had intended to jump back into my career once both children were in school full-time, but the pandemic hit while I was ramping up my job search, and I decided to put those plans on hold a little longer. 

As I began to search for a job in earnest in late 2021, Bridges Fund Management happened to have a need for a portfolio manager for a US fund it had launched back in 2014. I was delighted to come back to the organization that had helped me choose a new career path twenty years before. I've spent the last 2.5 years supporting our portfolio companies in the healthcare, fitness, and addiction treatment sectors with financial modeling and strategic analysis and supporting the firm itself through investor relations, compliance, and other operational work. 

In 2015, I began to attend South Burlington School Board meetings. I was initially drawn by the conversation around master planning and visioning, which was a process that was underway to determine the future facilities needs of our K-12 schools in South Burlington.  After several meetings in which I asked a lot of data- and finance-related questions, the district's business manager asked if I would join the Citizens' Budget Advisory Group, which acted as a sounding board as the district was developing its budget for the next fiscal year. When one of the school board members decided not to run for reelection, I ran for the open seat. I served three two-year terms on the board from 2016-2022 and served as chair of the board for the last 15 months of my tenure. 

I had always been a supporter of public education, and my family chose South Burlington as a place to settle based on the quality of its schools. My time on the school board gave me an even deeper understanding of just how important public education is to our democracy and an appreciation of the challenges faced by districts as they work to provide a high-quality public education. My seat on the board also provided another lens through which to view issues like affordable housing, the opioid crisis, food insecurity, domestic violence, discrimination, and other issues facing Vermonters as we saw their impact on our children. 

I am proud of the work we did as a board to make the district a more inclusive place, to plan for future capacity needs, and to maintain educational and co-curricular opportunities for our students despite the impact of failed budget votes and the pandemic. Through my school board service, I learned a lot about budgeting in the public sector, listening to and communicating with the public, negotiations, the sometimes-competing needs of members of our communities, and the impact on local communities of decisions made in Montpelier. These are all lessons that I rely upon in my work in the House.

In my "free" time I am the volunteer manager for Freddie's Nordic soccer team. I was honored by the Vermont Soccer Association as their 2023 volunteer of the year.

I was born and raised in rural Central Illinois. My younger brother and I and the other kids in our small town rode the bus eight miles to the next town over to attend school. My mother was a nurse, and my father was a mechanic who worked in various factories and workshops over the years. 

In middle school I applied for admission to University Laboratory High School on the campus of the University of Illinois. Uni High, as it is known, is a public magnet school, and it changed my life in more ways than one. Being surrounded by other kids from a range of different backgrounds who loved school and had high expectations of themselves helped me expand my view of what was possible in life. I also met my future husband there (though I certainly didn't know it at the time!). 

My junior year, our intrepid guidance counselor took a group of us on a college tour of the east coast. We visited many schools, but I fell in love with Brown University. I was lucky to be recruited for the track teams of several schools my senior year, including Brown. I graduated from Brown with a bachelor's degree in Russian Language and Literature and Business Economics.