The Beginning

When I was four I watched Jurassic Park. I remember being amazed by the larger-than-life animals roaring across our television. In kindergarten I walked across the stage on career day with my white safari hat and plaid shorts and proudly announced, to what I interpreted to be astonished faces, I was going to be paleontologist. My parents were great supporters of my interest in paleontology and some of my fondest childhood memories are of my dad and me driving to dig for 380 million year old marine fossils in New York. My life since I first saw that film has been a steady march towards fulfilling my goal to be a researcher in geology

As a child I never had much talent for drawing or painting, but I did have a passion for other forms of art: photography, writing, music, and theater. It is through these media that I discovered new ways of expressing my love for geology and the sciences in general. In high school I wrote poems about tectonics and the progression of geologic time. In college I published Steve the Stegosaurus, a children’s story about racism and injustice through dinosaurs, inspired by the The Land Before Time movies. I also took photographs of dynamic geologic scenery from across the US and the world in Iceland, Peru, and Estonia. Science, especially geology, is a field filled with technical jargon and concepts, but also with endless beauty. Some of it, like the volcanoes, glaciers, and sandstone archways, show obvious beauty, but a closer look at what appears to be mundane rock actually reveals countless stories of life and death, hundreds of millions of years old. Ancient storms, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions become real, and long extinct organisms come back to life. The lens with which a geologist sees the world is unique, and breathtaking. I want to share this view with the world.

Education in Science

I completed my undergraduate education at the State University of New York (SUNY) at the College of Oneonta dual majoring in geology and anthropology where I immersed myself in as field explorations and research projects I which I could participate. These included three field courses to Southern California where we focused on mapping structural, sedimentological, and geomorphological features, a three week course exploring the geology and biology of Colorado, Arizona and Utah, a glaciology and volcanolology trip to Iceland two months after the Eyjafjallajökull eruption in 2010, and numerous smaller trips along the northeastern United States. My senior thesis project focused on creating digital maps of dinosaur tracks at the Dinosaur Footprint Reservation in Holyoke, Massachusetts using various GPS, digital photography and other geophysical techniques (see more here). During my undergraduate degree, I was also a teaching assistant for a course called GEOFYRST which brought incoming freshmen across New York and Massachusetts teaching basic field methods for sedimentology, stratigraphy, paleontology, igneous and metamorphic petrography, geomorphology, near surface geophysics and structural geology.

On the archaeology side of things, I assisted a fellow student with a geophysical-archeological survey at the Pine Lake Archeological site near Oneonta, NY where we again used Ground Penetrating Radar along with Electromagnetic Induction with the set goal of trying to identify areas where the field school should conduct future excavations. I also participated in a methods course which included a preliminary excavation of a tavern that burned down in the 1800s in Oneonta.

My completed Masters and Doctoral studies were conducted at the University of Cincinnati, in Cincinnati, Ohio. Here I focused on studying the stratigraphy, sedimentology, paleontology and geochemistry of the Upper Ordovician (~450 million years) Waynesville Formation in Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana. During my PhD this study has expanded to studying rocks of the same age in Tennessee, various parts of Canada, Estonia, Poland, and Sweden (see more here). I have shared my research in a series of professional science publications including the Canadian Journal of Earth Science, Stratigraphy, Paleoworld, Geosciences, and Estonian Journal of Earth Science (complete list). I have also given presentations for public audiences as well as professional meetings in the United States, Canada, Germany, Sweden, Belgium and Estonia. As a student at UC, as well as a Fulbright Fellow to Canada, I have taught historical geology, physical geology, oceanography and have mentored multiple undergraduate students in senior thesis research involving stratigraphy, sedimentology, paleontology and geologic mapping. I have also had the opportunity to work as a teaching assistant for sedimentary geology and earth history, marine paleoenvironments and paleoecology, and paleontology and geobiology.

As a product of my Fulbright experience, I have started to develop an outreach program called Fossil Forward centered around educating the public (children, parents, and teachers) about geosciences.

Tangential Interests

With my love of science comes a not so surprising love of wildlife, the natural world and a desire to keep the planet preserved for all its inhabitants, present and future. The present threat of climate change, rising trash and pollution and human inequality has driven me to attempt to live a more Zero Waste and Sustainable lifestyle and to promote programs that aim to end inequality and human suffering. In my youth, I ran a Thanksgiving Food Drive that focused on providing needing families with turkeys and all the trimmings so they could get a taste of the holidays. I was immensely grateful to have received the Jefferson’s Award for Public Service as a result of this program. Although I am currently not developing any programs like this presently, I do support established initiatives like Katie’s Krops, and Kiva which also strive to fight hunger and inequality.