Climate and Carbon Scientist | Aerospace Engineer | Urbanist

Currently I am a Project Scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara with Dr. Anna Trugman. My current work focuses on the intersection of plant hydraulics, the carbon cycle, climate change to understand how rising atmospheric carbon dioxide and a warming atmosphere changes water stress in forests, their productivity, and their mortality. My work uses models and observations to span scales from leaf to tree to the globe.

            My research interests also include land-atmosphere interactions, the sensitivity of vegetation to climate variation (and vise versa), and energy/water/carbon flows through the biosphere. I use a wide a range of tools for my research including observations from remote sensing, flux towers, and field measurements of tree hydraulic parameters and numerical models including parsimonious trait enable physiological models of trees, data assimilation systems for the whole carbon cycle, and fully coupled Earth system models.

            Previously I was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara with Dr. Anna Trugman and a Postdoctoral Researcher at Stanford University with Dr. Alexandra Konings in the Remote Sensing Ecohydrology Lab. I received my PhD from the University of Washington Atmospheric Sciences Department with Dr. Abigail Swann in the Ecoclimate Lab. While in a pre-science life I worked at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena as a Mechanical Engineer helping build airborne imaging spectrometers (among other things) from the ground up and graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering.