Summary
My professional and educational history meanders because I wanted to continue ethnographic fieldwork in South Africa that I did as an undergrad in a PhD anthropology program, but did not get admitted after two years of applications. I knew I wanted to go back to school but wanted there to also be continuity and I had been broadly working in landscaping, gardening, plant nurseries, native plant design, urban farming/food sovereignty, permaculture, and utility forestry. It was a plant communities inventory and monitoring job for the National Parks Service in the Marin headlands that exposed me to ecology and the interconnectedness of flora and how ecosystems function and are structured through things like trophic cascades. I went to University of Idaho for my masters and worked for the Idaho Tree-Ring Lab and Idaho Terrestrial Ecosystem Analysis and Modeling Lab and got trained in earth systems modeling, carbon and nitrogen belowground and aboveground biogeochemistry, and various dendrochronological and dendroclimatological techniques and inference. In addition, I learned a lot about photosynthesis and tree physiology, and got trained on water potential, soil and leaf, and the Licor 6800 to better understand the effect of fire and drought stress on conifer photochemistry and hydraulics.
Research interests
- Ecophysiology
- Ecohydrology
- Social-ecological systems
- Fire ecology
- Forest ecology
- Conifer biodiversity
- Indigenous epistemologies
- Decolonial management
- Biogeochemistry
Education
- B.A. in Sociocultural Anthropology and Africana Studies, Bard College, 2016
- M.S. in Geography, University of Idaho, 2025