I was born and raised in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, with a year here and there in Granada, Spain; Elizabethtown, PA; Charlottesville, VA; and Barcelona, Spain. My mom taught Spanish at the college level at local Universities (James Madison Univeristy and Eastern Mennonite University) for most of my youth, and my dad spent many years in the Sociology Department at Bridgewater College. I attended Fort Defiance High School, but enjoyed spending my mornings at the Central Shenandoah Valley Regional Governor's School for Math, Science, and Technology. Through Mary Ann Angleberger (my high school freshman biology teacher) and Linda Cauley (my AP Environmental Science teacher), I enjoyed extending my love for the natural world and my curiosity about life into the classroom. I decided to pursue Biology at Juniata College; this quickly morphed into Environmental Science--a major that actually allowed me to spend time in the woods (and with cool professors like Neil Pelkey and Paula Martin) instead of in a lab with a pipette. Outside of science classes, I enjoyed leadership roles and participation in the Peace and Conflict Studies Student Organization and Environmental Science Society, as well as accompanying the Concert Choir. I worked and volunteered for the College's Raystown Field Station during an exciting phase of design for a new, federally-funded green facility on Lake Raystown. I spent my Junior year studying abroad in Ecuador, and spent fall semester taking courses at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito, and the spring semester interning in the Oriente (the jungle) at the Foundation for Integrated Conservation and Development (now, the Yachana Foundation). During that year in Ecuador, my love for learning about ecology and the natural world grew--so too did my curiosity about social psychology and economics. My internship left me questioning many "sustainable development" strategies, and I suddenly got curious about whether there were ways to bridge the many ideological gaps between conservation-oriented philosophies and economic paradigms. I returned to Juniata, and enrolled in two economics courses my senior year. My parents had divorced as I was finishing high school, and both remarried during my college years. My dad married Laura Desportes, an Educational Psychologist who loves animals, music, and is an amazing cook--and my mom married Antonio Martinez, a local architect who shares her love for travel and outdoor pursuits. I gained four more brothers in addition to my brother, Jordan--Cameron, Jared, Gabe, and Adrian. After I finished my undergraduate years at Juniata, I wound up at Virginia Tech in the Forestry department. Under the mentorship of Greg Amacher, a forest economist, I started to take more economics courses while staying firmly planted in a Natural Resources department. I found welcoming homes in both the Forestry Department and the Agricultural and Applied Economics departments. I enjoyed doing research that allowed me to travel and work in Brazil, and analyzing data from a questionnaire I had designed myself. The feeling of bringing a research project to fruition that I had seen through, from start to finish, was a satisfying one. I left Virginia Tech to live for 8 months in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, where I was working for the Woods Hole Research Center as a consultant and later as a research assistant for Frank Merry. In Brazil, I researched extensive cattle ranching and the peculiarities of the Brazilian supply chain in order to help design a spatially-explicit model of the net present value of cattle ranching in the Brazilian Amazon region with a team of researchers at the Remote Sensing Center at the Federal University of Minas Gerais. I also enjoyed the challenge of learning Portuguese, and getting to travel around a lot on my own. The summer of 2007 was dedicated to preparation for an intense month of fieldwork in the province of Sofala Mozambique, where we were conducting a large socioeconomic household survey in conjunction with some local NGOs and the provincial government. I spent many frustrating hours in government offices during that summer, but learned a few things about dealing with people and about project management. The actual month of fieldwork was one of the more intense experiences of my life--sleeping in a tent and awakening at daybreak to slurp some instant coffee before reviewing sampling maps, piling 10 people in the back of my pickup, and directing everyone else to their respective vehicle. The days were spent hiking sometimes up to 15 km to get to--and in between--interviews of several hours, and taking cell phone calls about flat tires, sick workers, or from people who couldn't find their way back to the group. Intense, but exhilarating. I spent October, 2007 through June of 2008 working on-site at the Woods Hole Reserach Center in Falmouth, Massachusetts. I enjoyed finally being able to work more directly with Frank, as well as to collaborate (and socialize) with an amazing and inspiring group of friends and colleagues. I knew if I didn't stick to my plan of going back to school, it would be easy to stay---so when I was accepted into the Ph.D. program in Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, I wistfully left Woods Hole and moved out west, after spending some time in Mozambique and in Virginia. I've found a new home in Berkeley, where people are mostly laid back and are amazingly accepting and friendly. I've loved reconnecting with old friends who live in the bay area, and making new ones both in and out of my program--and I found a partner and friend, James, who shares the ups and downs of the day-to-day with me as well as the occasional adventure. We enjoy walks in the Berkeley hills with our pup, Floyd, trips to the climbing gym, coffee, roadtrips, and spending time with friends (and family, when we get the chance). The coursework at Berkeley during my first three years has been draining, but I'm hopeful that I can tap into my academic passions again as I hunt for dissertation material. The 5-to-10-year plan is fuzzy and evolving, but it's easy to imagine finding a home at a college or university or in a governmental or non-governmental institution after I leave Berkeley, if/when I finish my degree here. |