Faculty Senators

Krista is the Program Site Coordinator and Restorative Lead Instructor for the Klamath Falls Campus.  She is responsible for coordinating continuing education and certification courses for restorative certification in Oregon. Her other teaching commitments are in dental materials, and periodontics. Krista has been working in the field of dentistry since 1998, first as a Certified Dental Assistant, then as a Registered Dental Hygienist. She received her dental hygiene degree from Clark College in Vancouver, WA, and her Bachelor of Science in Dental Hygiene from Eastern Washington University, and her Master of Science degree from Idaho State University. Krista is active in research regarding patients with limited scleroderma and Autism Spectrum Disorder. She has over 19 years of dental hygiene experience, which involve clinical practice in restorative, periodontics, and general dentistry in Washington, Oregon and Idaho. As natives of Washington State, Krista and her family are avid Seahawks fans. Other interests include music, reading, travel, and various outdoor activities in the beautiful Northwest.

I am a Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the Oregon Institute of Technology. I joined Oregon Tech in 2013. Before coming here, I was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Toledo, OH from 2010 to 2013.

I completed my Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Kentucky in August 2010, under the supervision of Prof. David Leep. My research interests are in Number Theory and Quadratic Forms. My Ph.D. thesis was titled "Diagonal Forms and Rationality of the Poincaré Series", which, loosely speaking, is the study of the number of solutions of a polynomial modulo powers of prime and the power series that it generates.

I did my undergraduate education -- B.S. (Hons.) in Mathematics from the Chennai Mathematical Institute, India in 2004.

Apart from mathematics, I'm also interested in scientific and recreational programming using Python and game programming using GameMaker Studio and Godot.

My personal and professional lives have always been centered on Outdoor Experiences. As the director of the Environmental Sciences program at Oregon Tech, I get to combine my love of nature and technical skills to promote data driven decision making in natural resource management. I have experience teaching the following courses: ENV data analysis, careers and professionalism, physical geography, intro to general chemistry, general biology, nutrition, environmental education, human anatomy, backpacking, intro to GIS, water resources, stream water chemistry, riparian assessment, and pollinator ecology. My current research is centered on pollinators. I co-advise the Beekeeping club on campus, and we use our apiary as a living laboratory for undergraduate research. In addition to honeybees, our students are conducting native pollinator surveys. Data from these ongoing studies will be used to track shifting phenological trends in response to climate change and increased forest fire activity within the Klamath Basin. When not on campus, you may find me with my family on the trail, riding my road bike, walking my two French bulldogs, playing ukulele, or paddling on the scenic waterways of southern Oregon.
 

I have been a member of the Natural Sciences faculty at Oregon Tech since Fall 2000. I mainly teach biochemistry and clinical pharmacology in our Biology-Health Sciences (BHS) program, although sometimes I have taught other courses too, including medical genetics, organic chemistry, immunology labs and general chemistry labs. I am proud of all the places of our alumni have gone on to, which are often into post-graduate medical programs like medical doctor, pharmacist, dentistry, physician assistant, veterinary medicine, physical therapy and others. All of these are focused differently from my own educational background, so I make it a priority to help my students think about biochemistry in ways that are applicable to medicine, rather than memorizing a bunch of facts that they could look up and will forget anyway. If you ever meet one of my former biochemistry students, ask them “how much wood could a woodchuck chuck?”—chances are they will remember it from my class, and maybe even how the woodchuck analogy can help explain enzyme kinetics.

I also advise students in our BHS program, and I am always eager to meet with prospective students, or to answer their questions by phone or email.

Outside of classes, I have been a mentor for a variety of undergraduate research projects. Currently I am working with students to study the molecular genetics of cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) in nearby Upper Klamath Lake, along with our department’s microbiologist, Professor Kamal Gandhi. My previous student-involved projects have included cloning of particular bacterial genes/proteins that had never been closely studied before, creation of a home-built fluorescence microscope with 3D-printed parts, finding errors in published, experimentally determined 3D molecular structures of proteins, and developing a simple method to test for gene variants in a dopamine receptor that has been linked to ADHD and risk-taking behavior.

In our cyanobacteria project, students isolate and quantify DNA from bacteria sampled from Upper Klamath Lake, and develop PCR (polymerase chain reaction) methods to identify which species are present and in what proportions. We also send out some samples for full-genome sequencing and analyze the massive amounts of data that come back from that. Along with being involved in genuine scientific discovery, students learn to work independently and as a team in the lab, develop and troubleshoot experimental protocols, and present their results to the university and at regional conferences.

The cyanobacteria that we study are ecologically interesting and important because they affect water quality in the lake—some of them produce toxins while others are harvested as healthy nutritional supplements. The balance between those opposites changes seasonally over each summer and likely between different locations in the lake. Upper Klamath Lake is also home to two species of critically endangered suckerfish (c’waam and koptu) that are culturally important to the Klamath Tribes. Every summer, the hatchlings of these fish have been dying off, so that while there are still some long-lived older fish, they are not able to be replaced in the lake. There is no one factor that controls the non-survival of the juvenile suckerfish, but the role of cyanobacteria, the toxins they produce, and the effect they have on oxygen depletion in the water are all worthy of further study in hopes of helping the fish.

Before I came to Oregon Tech, I earned a BSc (Honours) in Biochemistry from the University of Alberta (I’m Canadian, eh!), a Ph.D. in Chemistry from University of Oregon in Eugene, and did post-doctoral research at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. I also was a partner in a computer software consulting business for a few years.

When I’m not working, some of my hobbies include running, backpacking and camping. Last year my daughter and I took an amazing 9-day wilderness backpacking trek north of the Arctic circle on Baffin Island in Canada. I’ve climbed on Mt Shasta a bunch of times, including a couple where I guided former students to the summit. I often bicycle-commute to campus including in the snow, and I use my mountain bike, road bike and tandem bike for fun. In the summer of 2021, my spouse and I logged 1000 miles on our tandem in five months, doing various day rides all over Oregon.