Dr. Kirsten Sanford, Ph.D.

Before coming to Earth, Kirsten was stuck in a dead-end job as a space medic in charge of routine bloodwork in a M*A*S*H unit during the Clone Wars. With most of her hours spent doing midi-chlorian counts of sick and injured Jedi, the work quickly became boring for an active scientific mind like Kirsten's. Nothing is more annoying than a Knight of the Force who can't stop whining, and hearing nothing but that day in and day out, she just up and quit one day after reading a want-ad put out by the ICCX looking for scientists to be sent to Earth. Once on the job, Kirsten skillfully nosedived her AstroPod deep in some thick jungles near the planet's equator. She named the region Burma, in memory of her beloved pet space monkey that she was forced to leave behind on her homeworld. Initially mistaking elephants for the dominant sentient species of Earth, Kirsten spent several hundred years before realizing that it was humans she was meant to study. Once that minor error was rectified, however, she wasted little time and soon was hired as chief brain surgeon to the King of Siam, under whose patronage she was able to catalog the entire extant taxonomy of Southeast Asia's bacterial phyla (a great many centuries later, the events of this period in Kirsten's earthly tenure would inspire the musical "The King and I" starring Yul Brynner). In time, her scientific research led her to roam the world. She walked the steppes of ancient Russia, inadvertently inventing Tartar sauce, and at length arrived in Europe toward the end of the Dark Ages. Here she documented flora and fauna, instructed local healers on the use of vitamin C in treating the Black Death, and compiled many handwritten herbals, parchment documents penned in her flowery native alien script. Some of these can still be found in rare bookshops today; the inscrutable "Voynich Manuscript" is an example of Kirsten's early biological fieldwork on this planet. Kirsten helped bring the life sciences into the modern age when, in the mid-19th Century, she took work as a pest controller in the pea garden of an Augustinian monastery in Moravia. Here she helped a monk named Gregor Mendel develop his theories of trait heredity that would eventually grow into the science of genetics. Using her special powers, Kirsten then was able to command a flock of African swallows to carry her to the Americas, setting her down in California's fertile central valley. Pursuing her work with birds, Kirsten enrolled in a major human research institution and studied the effects of hormones on memory formation in zebra finches. During a hiatus from school, she found work in a prominent San Francisco research hospital working on scientific experiments in which willing human test subjects were given large doses of recreational drugs. Kirsten is now returning to school to finish her doctorate program in Neurophysiology, enjoying a special brand of masochism by choosing do both her undergrad as well as graduate work at the University of California at Davis. Apparently she loves the smell of cow poop in the morning. It smells like victory.

Kirsten's Science: Neurology and Cognition; Life Sciences
Special Power: Able to cause cellular senescence with a stern look; can speak with the birds
Homeworld: Alderaan

Kirsten's Bio: kirstensanford.com