About Me

How I became a seismologist was not a straight path (or initially intentional) by any means. I lack an apocryphal story about surviving a big earthquake or witnessing some other lurid natural disaster that compelled me beyond a reasonable doubt to pursue the study of elastic waves. Opportunities to become exposed to science didn't abound either on the Pyramid Lake Paiute reservation where I lived until I was twenty.

After a scholastically rocky high-school experience, I selected the Geophysics major at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) on a complete whim. My first research experience was cataloging craters on the NearSide of the Moon during a Research Experience for Undergraduates program in Astronomy at Northern Arizona University. I enjoyed planetary science and geophysics, but could not see myself as a full-blown 'scientist'. Nor did I realize the work and steps required (i.e., graduate school) to procure the knowledge base I wanted.

It was not until after I graduated from UNR that I started doing seismology. I worked at the Nevada Seismological Laboratory for ~1.5 years performing ambient-noise autocorrelations and surface-wave:body-wave amplitude ratio analyses. The biggest takeaway from this time was the ability to program and work with real-world data; both are major assets when applying to graduate school and conducting research, in general.

I then soldiered on for a Master's at Boise State University (I was not ready to commit 100% to the PhD). But it was during my Master's thesis work (and after an internship at a catastrophe modeling company) that I decided I was finally ready to do a PhD. A PhD focused on numerical models of how big earthquakes happen - their initiation, propagation, and arrest. My perspective transitioned from merely observing seismic phenomena to using models to explain the physics behind them.

...

My doctorate was completed in 2021 at the University of Michigan under the direction of Dr. Yihe Huang. My main project focused on physics-based models of what a large earthquake could look like on the Cascadia plate boundary fault (megathrust). We harnessed what observations we could to provide our best at a constrained earthquake source-model. I also led a Michigan team project that looked at stresses imparted to the Garlock fault in southern California as a result of the magnitude 7.1 earthquake that occurred on July 6, 2019.

...

I was a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the Air Force Research Lab from 2021 - 2022. I used 3-D finite element models to explore how inelastic sources effects influence near- and far-field seismic data.

...

I am currently a research geophysicist at Sandia National Labs. I work on seismic signal analysis and algorithm development.

...

Besides seismology, I am interested in science policy, playing the violin, hiking and imbibing good coffee.