Measuring light levels in Delaware Estuary (June 2010)
I grew up in Southern California and spent my early years adventuring in the Mohave Desert and playing in the waves of Zuma Beach.
I began my scientific career at Loyola Marymount University, working as an undergraduate researcher in organic chemistry with Dr. Jeremy McCallum. There I studied Guanine-quadraplex formations, developing various syntheses and modeling molecular structures.
I spent the summer of 2010 at Rutgers University for the Research in Ocean Sciences (RIOS) REU program. Working with John Wilkin, I developed a project looking at the connections between sediment, optics, and productivity in the Delaware estuary. After just 10 weeks of working on this project, I found myself hooked on physical oceanography and knew I wanted to study it further.
Some residual dye on my face after a dye injection in the Chukchi Sea.. oops! (September 2014)
In 2016 I earned my PhD in physical oceanography from Rutgers University under the advisement of Bob Chant and John Wilkin. With the support of an NSF graduate research fellowship, I studied sediment dynamics in the Delaware Estuary. I used both observations and a numerical model to analyze how lateral processes facilitate along-estuary sediment transport and contribute to heterogeneity in the distribution of estuarine sediment.
After graduation, I headed back west for a short a postdoc at Scripps Institute of Oceanography working with Sarah Giddings and Falk Feddersen. There, I worked on the development of a numerical model of the Tijuana river estuary and southern California inner-shelf to look at connectivity between the estuary and nearshore.
In September 2017, I began a ONR-funded postdoc at Oregon State University with Jim Lerczak and Jack Barth studying the shoreward propagation of non-linear internal waves (NLIWs) on the inner-shelf of central California. In this project, we use data from shipboard surveys and a mooring array offshore of central California to evaluate how NLIWs evolve during shoaling and influence shelf stratification.
