I’m originally from Rochester N.Y. where I grew up not far from the shores of Lake Ontario. I attended college at S.U.N.Y. E.S.F. in Syracuse N.Y. where I earned a B.S. in environmental and forest biology and an additional concentration in wildlife science. After graduation, I spent some time as a field assistant on a project studying the eating habits of coyotes. While coyote wrangling left me with some great stories, I decided I’d like to study something a little more sedentary. I’d taken a GIS course at E.S.F. and when I researched graduate school options I discovered that only a short drive away in Buffalo there was a well-regarded geography department at U.B.
While pursuing a doctorate at S.U.N.Y. University at Buffalo I explored biogeography, remote sensing, and vegetation phenology. I discovered the joys of coding and set out to focus my dissertation on creating models that would incorporate more physiological mechanisms into models of forest phenology. This was an invigorating time where I gained an appreciation for interdisciplinary science and learned the foundational principles of geographic thought.
After completing my dissertation, I jumped feet first into the world of aquatic ecology when I became a postdoc in the labs of Emily Bernhardt and Jim Heffernan. There I joined a wonderful collection of academic and federal researchers on the StreamPULSE project which was focused on learning more about the patterns and drivers of stream metabolism. Here I was able to expand my knowledge on timeseries analysis, clustering, aquatic ecology, model development, and programming. It was a challenging but rewarding experience and I am extremely proud to have been able to fuse terrestrial and aquatic knowledge to generate some new insights about river metabolism.
Eventually I moved to a new postdoc position at the USGS headquarters in Reston with a former StreamPULSE collaborator, Jud Harvey. There we refined and extended some of our prior work and eventually began to branch out into other aspects of water quality. Here I became a member of a nationally-scoped USGS effort examining potential proxies for harmful algal blooms. This work allowed me to gain experience in machine learning and demonstrate the importance of spatial cross-validation routines for assessing models. Eventually I became a federal employee with the USGS at the New York Water Science Center where I was fortunate enough to work under Jennifer Graham. Here I primarily focused on developing models of water quality measures related to harmful algal blooms, including predicting chlorophyll from remote sensing.
In my free time I enjoy cycling, playing guitar, painting, and spending time with my wife and our dog. I’m a lover of board games, British comedy, science fiction, and puns of all varieties.