Taya arrived at ASU in 2015 with an interest in evolutionary anthropolgy, namely the evolution of human life histories. While in graduate school, she developed a growing passion for science education and issues of diversity and inclusion in academic settings. After completing a master's degree in evolutionary anthropology, she thus started to pursue a Scientific Teaching in Higher Education Certificate through the School of Life Sciences. This lead to her involvement in the Biology Education Research Lab. As of 2019, Taya is a PhD student in the BER lab. She works on projects relating to evolutionary medicine instruction and evolution acceptance. She is especially interested in researching factors that influence acceptance of human evolution, as well as more effective and inclusive strategies for teaching evolutionary anthropology.