Graduate research
I earned my Masters and PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Arizona Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department. I minored in Global Change, which was an interdisciplinary program where I learned from the best about about climate systems, hydroclimatology, society and science, and soil biogeochemistry. My dissertation with Dr. Travis Huxman focused on the response of soil carbon cycling to precipitation pulse events in the context of shrub encroachment, invasive grasses, and desert crusts in the Sonoran Desert. Dr. Huxman is now at UC Irvine.
I was awarded the Galielo Circle Scholarship, the Hoshaw Award for excellence in graduate research, the NSF GK-12 graduate fellowship, the McGinnies Arid Land Scholarship, and the American Geophysical Union spring meeting award for best student poster in Hydrology.
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Publications can be found here.
Postdoctoral research
I developed Bayesian modeling skills during my postdoc with Dr. Kiona Ogle at the University of Wyoming (Dr. Ogle is now at Northern Arizona University). As part of my postdoc work, I synthesized the response of soil respiration across seven deserts to temperature and moisture, and I examined the production of CO under snowpack in mountain ecosystems near Laramie, Wyoming. Dr. Colin Tucker continued this work after I left for Alaska. Given my interest in the use of stable isotopes for understanding elemental cycling, I studied the impact of glacial melt on streamflow in the Wind River Range of Wyoming with Dr. David Williams. I received an NSF Office of Polar Programs Postdoctoral Fellowship with Dr. Kiona Ogle and Dr. Jeff Welker to study plant use of different water sources, including permafrost thaw water, in Interior Alaska’s boreal forest. I conducted this work as a researcher in the International Arctic Research Center at UAF. I also contributed to the first phase of research with the NGEE Arctic project.
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Publications can be found here​.
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