Biography

I have developed an interdisciplinary research perspective by studying a wide range of interrelated topics and coalescing them to better understand the complexity of the whole earth system. Growing up in rural, forested California influenced my decision to apply my B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science to regional environmental monitoring. This led to an M.S. degree in Aerospace Engineering and Sciences, with emphases in remote sensing and atmospheric and oceanic physics, for which I developed and evaluated an automated method for identifying clouds in satellite imagery. An interest in pollution impacts on forests spurred me to develop, for my Ph.D. in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, a project to identify and model spectral and biochemical markers of ozone stress in pine needles. To better understand the relations governing human impacts on the environment, and how science characterizes such impacts, I have extensively pursued studies in Environmental Philosophy and History, Human Geography, and Science and Technology Studies. A desire to expand the scope of my research to more directly include human activity led me to ecosystem modeling of bioenergy crops. I also developed a high-spatial resolution framework for running this model that included downscaling global climate forcing data (HRCD). This work raised numerous questions regarding scale and uncertainty that had been smoldering since my early remote sensing work on clouds. I consider these questions crucial to addressing the challenges of understanding how human activities influence local, regional, and global earth processes, and vice-versa.