Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Exeter
I am a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Remote Sensing and Ecological Modelling at the University of Exeter on the Bladen Legacy project. My research investigates the long-lasting impacts of humans on environments with a focus on northern Central America currently. I am particularly interested in how forest composition and structure vary with past human presence and activities, and the use of remote sensing and spatially-explicit modelling to elucidate those patterns at a landscape scale.
My PhD, from the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin, focused on Maya landscape legacies in northwestern Belize using airborne lidar data, culminating in a dissertation titled “Sensing Human Legacies in the Tropical Forests of northern Central America.” My role with Bladen Legacy extends and improves these methods in an area of the Bladen Nature Reserve in southern Belize towards a better understanding of long-term human interactions with environments and how those impacts are reflected in modern vegetation dynamics.
I completed my master’s thesis in the Department of Geography and the Environment at UT Austin, entitled “Soil characteristics associated with cohune palm (Attalea cohune) forests.” I received a bachelor’s degree in Environmental Biology from Georgetown University in 2013. During and directly after my undergraduate career I assisted the Shark Bay Dolphin Research Project in both Washington, DC and Monkey Mia, Western Australia. I have previously worked with the Pennsylvania Game Commission and the World Wildlife Fund. Starting in 2012, I assisted Tim and Sheryl Beach with their seasonal fieldwork in Belize, Mexico, and Guatemala, which brought me to UT Austin in 2016 for graduate work. I am a National Geographic Young Explorer, an NDSEG fellow, a Lewis and Clark Field Scholar, as well as the recipient of multiple field and travel grants.
Find out more about me on my personal website.