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CannAmerica appointed Diana Angling to chief operating officer, a move that will allow her to take what she’d learned in the higher education world and apply it to the growing company’s goals in the burgeoning U.S. cannabis industry.

Anglin comes to her position at CannAmerica following a career in regulatory compliance in higher education. She held various positions at the Colorado School of Mines, the University of Colorado Denver, the University of Arizona, the University of Phoenix and Western Michigan University, and at each institution she learned valuable lessons in guiding teams toward specific policy goals set by state and federal governments. While the federal government may not be involved in the cannabis industry (yet), Anglin’s expertise in navigating state regulations will be pivotal in advancing CannAmerica’s work across the country.

She worked closely with Title IV and NCAA regulations to ensure that students attending those universities remained in compliance—and able to continue their work in academics and athletics.

Prior to her work at CannAmerica, Anglin also spent time on the policy side of the Colorado cannabis market. She served as the chair of the Colorado Cannabis Chamber of Commerce Compliance Council (the “C6” in local colloquy, Anglin says) from 2014-2016.

“I ended up working with a lot of compliance people so that we could all work through issues that were local—when we’d find discrepancies in the state requirements versus the local and how to maneuver through that and to help to help municipalities clean up their rules and make them smoother,” she says.

Vigilance is key, Anglin adds, in an industry that’s heavily scrutinized by regulators from all angles.

“Something that we reflect back on [is] that sometimes we’ve asked ourselves, ‘Was this the direction we should have gone?’” she says. “We are a group of stoners, and going public, I think, made people think that that were something different than that. We are all in this because we have a love of the plant. We believe that it should be available for anyone who wants to consume it. And I think that sometimes the need for the corporate image can confuse that. And we’re doing this for the love of the plant.”

It’s that combination of vision and wise regulatory compliance that has allowed CannAmerica to set up partnerships with businesses and nonprofits in new cannabis markets, like Oklahoma and Massachusetts.

“Meg Sanders (CEO of Canna Provisions) and I were on rulemaking panels together with Colorado’s regulatory agencies when the state’s adult-use Amendment 64 was implemented,” CannAmerica CEO Dan Anglin said in a public statement. “With this agreement, we are taking advantage of a rare opportunity to partner with long-time friends who created the cannabis industry in Colorado alongside us.”

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“We spend a lot of time talking about those kinds of things with our partners and discussing other places where our products would be beneficial—other states, that sort of thing,” Anglin says. “It’s exciting, and it creates excitement and a drive.”