In this presentation I will focus on my life experiences as a graduate student and as a postdoctoral fellow. I will discuss the importance of the Stewardship Science Graduate Fellowship in the development of my career and how this impacted my life and led me to my current position as a research scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Finally I will introduce my current research in the area of advanced quantum simulation methods for materials at extreme conditions. Specifically, I will describe our efforts to build high pressure and high temperature equations of state of materials relevant to planetary science.
