About

I am currently a forestry PhD student at the University of Montana working within the Numerical Terradynamic Simulation Group (NTSG). Before Montana, I was a geography master's student at Penn State University working both within the GeoVISTA Center and the Landscape Ecology at Penn State group. In a previous life, I was a software engineer (mostly Java web development) for a large financial institution in the Philadelphia area. Coding a financial website was fun at times, but I needed an endeavor that was more fulfilling and matched my passions. I always loved the environmental and earth sciences and had a tremendous passion for the outdoors. However, I never knew how to combine those interests with my software engineering skills. This is when I found geography and, in turn, the fields of geographical information science (GISci), remote sensing, and landscape/ecosystem ecology—awesome research areas in which to now be involved!

Presently, I am interested in the application of GISci, ecosystem modeling, and remote sensing to vegetation dynamics in mountain regions and Arctic environments. My master’s thesis research focused on investigating the effects of burn severity on post-fire vegetation dynamics in interior Alaska using both Landsat and MODIS imagery and various geovisualization techniques (e.g.—linked data views, web maps, time series animation).