Barbara Lougheed was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii, where she earned a Bachelor's of Business Administration in Marketing from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She moved to Florida for the warmer, calmer weather, and has now lived through multiple freezes and hurricanes. She worked as a database map analyst at a major newspaper before her early retirement. She loves analyzing data and looking for patterns, and this trait has served her well as a thyroid researcher. This knack for medical research led her to write TiredThyroid.com. Her love of travel, photography, and food then led her