Chodon received her Ph.D. in Plant Biology from UC Berkeley in 2010. She then completed a postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Craig Moritz at UC Berkeley working on biogeography and next generation sequencing in Australian reptiles. She later worked in Professor Chelse Specht’s Lab at UC Berkeley working on comparative methods for phylogenetic analyses as part of the NSF funded Arbor Initiative. This initiative takes on the daunting volumes of data researchers face, looking at how to organize that information into a usable format. This project team is creating software tools to develop a way to visually portray evolutionary data so scientists can see, at a glance, how organisms are related. The results have the potential to transform the way biologists test evolutionary and ecological hypotheses.