Where are you from?
I am from Rhode Island, originally up there, and I lived in Massachusetts for about 10 years before moving to Montana.
What do you like to do for fun?
I like to get outside and hike. I am learning guitar and Spanish. Working in the sciences, I think it's very helpful to keep your brain healthy and try to find a balance. That actually can help you do your scientific analysis work.
What do you research?
I work on a couple different projects. One is running models and trying to estimate ecosystem processes. We’re focused on Arctic and boreal regions, because these regions that are very far north are warming up very quickly and also contain a lot of carbon in the soil that's been kind of locked up there for 1000s of years. With global warming, there possibility that this carbon could get released into the atmosphere. But the Arctic is so big and so hard to measure that as a scientific community, we just don't really know, on balance how much carbon the region is emitting to the atmosphere.
We use computer modeling to try to estimate this over big regions. That’s one project I'm working on, and another project is part of the smart fires work. And for that, we are trying to model smoke emissions from wildfires and prescribed fires to get an idea of how smoke exposure from wildfires affects people versus how smoke exposure from prescribed fires affects them.
What got you into STEM?
From a young age, I was pretty interested in environmental issues. I remember learning about climate change when I was younger, and that was a big motivation. I remember one time we went to an exhibit about the rainforest of the world. It showed an estimate of the rainforest disappearing. And by year, the years were increasing in the rainforest were disappearing. I think I was around 10 years old. It had a big impact on me, and I was really interested in going into environmental science.
My parents weren’t scientists but they were very supportive.
How did you go from that initial inspiration to your current work?
When I started college, I didn't really know what to do, but ecology seemed like the closest thing. I took ecology classes and general environmental science classes without a very clear idea of what to do with that. Then my senior year of college, just by chance, I took this class called remote sensing. I had no idea what remote sensing was. It just fit into my schedule.
It turned out that I loved it. Environmental remote sensing means using satellites or airplanes or even drones to get imagery of the Earth's surface and information about different ecosystem processes at large scales. I loved that part of it. I loved being able to work at local scales or regional scales or an entire continent or even the whole globe. It was really fun to be able to organize data spatially. You can combine your ecological knowledge with more quantitative analysis and mapping. From there, I took more classes, and I stayed for a master's. I took more remote sensing, and it kind of just went from there.
What is your advice for young people in STEM?
One thing I wish, when I look back on college, I wish I had more statistics classes, because that could really, that could be useful in so many different science fields, or data analysis fields. And I know they are hard in the moment. They're they're hard classes, and it's hard to, it's hard to match up what you're learning, the material in the class, with maybe a project you're working on. It seems hard to apply the information that you learn in the class, but it's really important to build up that background knowledge. It can be applied in a lot of different ways and for a lot of different analyses and challenges that you might encounter in your future career.
What challenges have you faced as a woman in STEM circles?
Sometimes somebody will just assume that you don't know how to code, or something like that. It hasn't been a huge deal. You just say, Oh no, I’m a coder. I think there's been bigger challenges where sometimes you kind of feel like you've been excluded from meetings. I would say to young girls, don’t let that stop you. Just keep doing your work. Do the best work you can. And find the right people to work with.
What do you want to do next?
Complete more applied work using spatial data to understand environmental change.