Would you provide some detail about your background? I’d love to hear your full story. I don’t even know if I’ve actually heard this, so this will be really enjoyable. Where did you grow up? What, um, how did you get started? Tell us about the beginnings of Christina’s here.
So, I grew up in the Pacific Northwest. I grew up in Port Orchard, and, uh, I was born in Walla Walla, went to preschool in Seattle, and then we moved out to Port Orchard, and I was there for most of my upbringing. Then I went to Occidental College, and I got degrees in Biochemistry and physics there. And then, uh, kind of went to work. Um, I studied Japanese for 10 years, and I lived in Japan for about four non-consecutive years. Um, and I came back, and I got my engineering degree at the University of Washington. And I think that’s it.
Yeah, excellent. Well, we have the Japanese connection. I took two years in high school, and so remember just a little bit of that. I’ve never been to Japan. I really need to go. Um, I really want to go. Uh, this is my news about you. Um, thank you for sharing that. So, University of Washington, what was your degree in engineering?
So, I actually had a technical communication degree. Uh, cool, where it was an emphasis in, uh, Japanese. And so I basically could conduct any engineering in Japanese. And, uh, as part of the program, I was a biochemist in Tokyo for a while for the research arm of Fujitsu. And so they were making water meters for streams to detect phosphates, and so I got to patent a couple of inventions there. So that was kind of my first taste of that, but it was corporate, so they kind of handled all of that, you know, kind of process for me. And so I didn’t see a lot of the administrative work that it requires to do that.