Robin grew up in southeastern New Mexico, where she got her first taste of emergency response as a volunteer firefighter just after she graduated high school. That early passion for helping people was solidified during her undergraduate tenure at New Mexico State University, where she continued her service and training as a firefighter and EMT. She would go on to spend thirteen years in emergency services with a variety of agencies around the country, becoming a paramedic and a dispatcher. She earned a master’s degree in medicine at the University of New England and worked as a physician assistant in cardiovascular medicine for seven years.

In that time, she had the opportunity to train and work in the Arctic in both Alaska and Greenland. Her love for remote northern climates and her insatiable wanderlust inspired “Price Per Barrel: The Human Cost of Extraction,” her first non-fiction book. Robin has previously published in academic journals related to her medical practice including “The Hidden Field of View: Challenges in Sustaining a Robotic Open-Heart Program” for the Indian Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery and “Robotic Surgery: Would Any Other (More Accurate) Name Smell as Sweet?” for the Journal of Robotic Surgery.

In her travels, Robin has visited every state in the union, every province in Canada and more than three dozen countries. She has left the practice of medicine and now works in documentary film making, which allows her to tell stories in a whole new way. She is a dancer and choreographer who feels most at home when she is on a stage.

She is currently working on her next book, “Insensible Loss: Why Doctors Quit.” It’s a critical look at medicine in the United States and what drives providers like her out of the field and into work they find more rewarding.