In college, I studied Geology. At the time, I was also an undergraduate researcher/assistant to a member of the NASA InSight Participating Scientist Program, where I used images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in GIS to estimate thicknesses and other properties of stratigraphic units on Mars.

This work led to a greater understanding of the potential landing zones for the InSight Lander, and what obstacles the lander would face upon landing and during drilling into the dusty Martian surface.

Straight out of college, I entered the environmental consulting industry in New York City. My responsibilities included groundwater sampling, soil sampling, soil-gas vapor sampling, waste characterization, and supervision of drilling and waste removal.

However, despite being in a not-so-glamorous part of the city, and an equally unglamorous industry, I still found beauty where I could.

My next position of employment represented my return to remote sensing as a vital aspect of who I was, and what I felt I best aligned with at the time. I worked for Roadview Inc., a subsidiary of Mandli Communications, based out of Fitchburg, Wisconsin.

My job was to alternate between being a long-distance driver and a LiDAR technician, including all the validation, troubleshooting, and maintenance of collection equipment that came along with these responsibilities. We scanned roadways and their periphery.

For a while, I got to experience much of the contiguous United States while living in odd places, exploring on my down-time, and working a job that felt more like a hobby than anything else.

My engagement with remote sensing and geology did not end with Mandli. I wanted to contribute to the field, and wanted to find novel ways of merging the two sciences in a way that benefited society more directly. Thus, I started a Masters program at East Carolina University (ECU) to study Geography/Geomorphology.

For a while, I got to play in a sandbox designed as one of the most elaborate photogrammetry workspaces I think I will ever see. I also built an app to help some cool students document litter globally.

My Masters culminated in a thesis focusing on the influence of channel sinuosity on whether a debris flow (a type of landslide) will jump out of the confines of a stream channel. You can check out my thesis here if you’re interested.

Now I work at Stantec, doing everything I was trained to do, and more. My specialty at Stantec is post-wildfire debris flow mitigation, modeling landslide hazard and risk for numerous public and private clients, however, my responsibilities don’t end there, I get to apply what I’ve learned in the past to what I do today. I’ve adapted my skills from the environmental consulting industry to perform soil and rock drilling supervision and materials characterization from the woods of Maine to the hills of Arizona. I adapted my skills from the LiDAR collection & processing job, and the photogrammetry lab of ECU, to collect and process 3D data of all kinds, and build models of natural landscapes under stress of wildfire activity and subsequent hillslope failure.