Justin Kress was born and raised on a farm in the small town of Manchester, Michigan. He graduated from Clinton High School in 2010 and joined the US Navy in July of the same year. He spent four years working on airplane engines and engine components on land and on the USS Truman. He started attending Northwestern Michigan College in the spring of 2018 with the intention of studying aerospace engineering; however, it was in the planetary astronomy class that he knew he had to be a part of the astronomy field. Since then, he has spent many hours learning about black holes, dark matter and the like. In the Fall 2019 semester, he became the lab assistant to his professer, SSA Jerry Dobek, who has encouraged and inspired him.