Gwynne Stump’s love of nature began early, although ‘home’ changed quite a bit along the way. Growing up, she moved up and down the East Coast. Her homes included Washington, D.C., Rhode Island, Florida, and Pennsylvania, including a memorable stretch living aboard a sailboat in Florida. During her senior year of high school, her family moved to California’s Central Coast. This began a new chapter that would eventually lead her toward a career in biology.
Gwynne earned her undergraduate degree in Integrative Biology from the University of California Berkeley. She went on to earn a Ph.D. in Biology from Arizona State University. Her graduate research focused on lizards and how environmental stress can influence developing offspring. Along the way, she also discovered how much she enjoyed teaching. By working with college students in biology, anatomy, and physiology, she found that some of her favorite moments in science came from helping someone else understand something for the first time.
After graduate school, Gwynne returned to California’s Central Coast and took a rather different turn. She and her husband opened a restaurant, SloCo Pasty Co., in San Luis Obispo. For five years, she helped build and run the restaurant from the ground up. After the birth of her two children, she stepped away to focus more on family . She later returned to science, helping establish and run a clinical laboratory that measured radiation doses delivered to cancer patients.
Teaching, however, kept finding its way back into her life. Gwynne volunteered for several years as an instructor at a girls’ STEAM camp. There, she created hands-on lessons designed to make science approachable, creative, and fun. She has also worked as a substitute teacher and has always been drawn to learning that involves doing, exploring, asking questions, and getting a little messy.
After moving to Western North Carolina, Gwynne quickly fell in love with the incredible diversity of wildlife in the Southern Appalachian Mountains. Volunteering with Appalachian Wildlife Refuge gave her the opportunity to care for native wildlife while learning more about the ecosystems of her new home.
That combination of science, teaching, curiosity, and a love of the outdoors ultimately led Gwynne to Muddy Sneakers. As an Outdoor Educator, she loves helping students discover that science isn’t just something found in a textbook. It is happening all around them. Whether they are turning over a log to discover what lives beneath it, investigating changes in matter, or stopping on a trail to ask, ‘Why does that happen?’, Gwynne especially enjoys those moments when curiosity takes over and students begin making their own connections.
Outside of Muddy Sneakers, Gwynne loves long hikes in the mountains with her dog, swimming, crafting, reading, and spending time with her husband and two children.