Science

I am currently working on a project to develop probabilistic models for avalanches in Northern California. Backcountry skiing and snowboarding are becoming popular ways to recreate on snow outside of a ski resort setting. However, there are additional dangers that come from skiing on ungroomed snow outside of a ski resort. Avalanche forecasters integrate daily snow observations with weather forecasts and snowpack history to issue daily estimates of how likely avalanches are. For this project, I collaborate with the Mount Shasta Avalanche Center and the US Forest Service to visualize historic avalanche data and develop probabilistic models to help avalanche forecasters better predict avalanches. The project involves webscraping, database design, probabilistic models, and human decision making in the backcountry.The key collaborators on this project are Avalanche Forecasters Nick Meyers, Casey Glaubman, Eric Falconer, and Sam Clairemont of the Mount Shasta Avalanche Center. Read more about the project here.

Most recently, I was the Global Environmental Change Fellow at Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) working at the intersection between invasive species, climate change and wildfire in Californian ecosystems. My project involved developing probabilistic models to work across environmental scales to understand wildfire spread and impact. I was also the Data Science Communications Manager at BIDS. My projects in this role included visual and written science communications (sci-comm) articles, websites, data visualizations, illustrations, and infographics of data intensive projects across the institute.

As an NSF Graduate Research Fellow, I studied the effects of elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide and water availability on plant growth. I then blended this knowledge of plant metabolism with computational biology to build genetically informed mathematical models of plant growth as part of an NSF postdoctoral fellowship at UC Davis. Recently, I co-founded and was the VP of Genomics at Rev Genomics, which uses genomics, statistics, molecular genetics, and tissue culture to create new strains of Cannabis for the legal market. Rev Genomics was funded by Y-Combinator and other prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firms and continues to innovate in the Cannabis biotech space.

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Projects