About Me

I am a Scientist researching the intersection of rivers, landscapes, and climate at the Utah State University within the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering and the Utah Water Research Laboratory. My expertise includes geomorphology, sediment transport, river hydraulics, flooding, surface & shallow-subsurface hydrology, and other environmental engineering topics.

I grew up in rural Northern California and while I have lived across the United States, I still consider the region home. Upon graduating from high school I went to college at Mendocino Community College & UC Berkeley. At Berkeley I spent time working in a variety of research groups spanning astronomy education, compressed earth materials, and pyroclastic flows. My interest in the outdoors and space led me on a circuitous route to be interested in the landscapes of Mars and then mostly Earth landscapes (because we can touch them), which led me to Philadelphia to earn a Ph.D. in Earth & Environmental Science in 2014. After finishing my Ph.D., I migrated towards Engineering as my interests have shifted towards problems impacting society in the near(ish) future and worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the St. Anthony Falls Laboratory at the University of Minnesota. Prior to joining USU I spent four years at Northwestern University gaining additional training in hydrology, environmental engineering, and conservation science.

Research Interests

Through my research I seek to understand how natural and urban landscapes will respond to climate change and anthropogenic (human) modification. To date, river networks through the lens of sediment transport have formed the core area of my research as they represent one of the few connecting elements throughout landscapes writ large. Much of my work revolves around understanding the physics of grain scale processes within rivers and how these processes scale up to inform the behavior of rivers through the emergence of patterns and feedback loops over larger distances and longer timescales. A key outcome of this research is to translate our fundamental science questions into functioning and actionable solutions for problems society is facing now and problems we will be facing in the near future. I approach these problems and questions through a mix of laboratory and field experiments, field data collection and monitoring, and physical modeling of large environmental data sets.