Pat grew up in Los Angeles with her parents and two older brothers. She spent a year in Europe after High School and returned to the USA to study at Chouinard Art Institute, earning a BFA. She came to Alaska in 1978 to work on a documentary film about the people of St. Paul in the Pribilof Islands.   Alaska was the first place she wanted to call home. In 1984, after working for the Alaska Native Human Resource Development Project (ANHRDP) in the early ‘80’s and meeting many people from the Interior, she moved to Fort Yukon and spent the years between 1985 and 2002 working with the village Chiefs in the Yukon Flats, as their Executive Director, to create and build the Council of Athabascan Tribal Governments (CATG), a consortium of ten Tribal Governments. During that time, the Interior-Aleutians Campus (I-AC) was instrumental in building the capacity of CATG employees and in introducing new communications technology. Starting in 2004, Pat spent the next four years earning a Master’s in Public Administration at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a Masters in Business Administration at Simmons School of Management. She returned to Fort Yukon each summer, completing her studies in August 2008.

In August 2009 after a year’s break, Pat began her work as the Yukon Flats Center Coordinator where she is employed today with responsibilities in recruiting, marketing, advising students, fulfilling the diverse academic needs of the Yukon Flats communities, developing local courses, identifying instructors, developing partnerships with Tribal Governments, the Yukon Flats School District, the various CATG departments, and others. Pat also assists local organizations in using the I-AC Yukon Flats Center for community events, trainings, workshops, and meetings.

Pat’s areas of interest lie in community development, learning about national and global issues and policies, lifelong learning, photography, and gardening.