My research investigates the impacts of climate change and land management on forest disturbance. I am particularly curious about how disturbance regimes are being altered due to management strategies and changes in climate patterns, how these disturbance regimes are interacting with each other within forest ecosystems, and how these factors are transforming forest community composition and ecosystem function. I am currently working on a project evaluating the interacting effects of wildfire and drought inside and outside Giant Sequoia groves in the Sierra Nevadas. For my next project, I’m dreaming up ways to explore novel disturbances in subalpine forests by using deep machine learning methods to scale up forest data collection from field plot to landscape by combining historic and contemporary field, drone, and satellite data.

I am passionate about advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion in the field of ecology, as well as interrogating the systems of oppression that both shape the structure of science and are perpetuated by scientific research. I co-chair the Graduate Group in Ecology’s Diversity Committee Admissions and Awards Subcommittee, which works to improve recruitment and retention of folks with marginalized identities in science. I also serve as the graduate student co-facilitator on the California Consortium for Inclusive Doctoral Education (C-CIDE) UC Davis Campus Team, which is creating and implementing faculty trainings in holistic admissions for STEM graduate programs. Finally, I am an active member of the Graduate Group in Ecology’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Task Force.

Before coming to UC Davis I worked diverse jobs spanning conservation and restoration projects, environmental education, and ecology research (including stints with the Warren lab at Oregon State University, Point Blue Conservation Science in Sonoma County, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, the Nature Conservancy in Arizona, and the US Forest Service Ecology Program throughout the Sierra Nevadas). I graduated from UC Berkeley in 2015 with degrees in Philosophy and Integrative Biology.