Born and raised in California, Regina first came to Nantucket as a National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduates (NSF-REU) intern under the tutelage of former Director of Astronomy, Dr. Vladimir Strelnitski. This formative experience helped inspire her to make a career out of her love for astronomy.After completing her B.S. degree in Physics, Regina won a Thomas J. Watson Foundation Fellowship that supported her in a year-long adventure travelling around the world and investigating the effects of culture on science through the eyes of women astronomers.In 1999, Regina returned to the MMA as the Assistant Director of Astronomy until 2002 when she left to pursue graduate studies in California. Regina earned her Ph.D. in Physics at UC San Diego, specializing in studies of galaxy formation and evolution. She continued this work as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge and then won a prestigious National Science Foundation Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship that she took to the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawai’i. There she used the largest optical telescopes in the world to obtain the first spectral images of normal galaxies in the early Universe.Before moving back to Nantucket, Regina was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Physics at Willamette University in Oregon.