Hi! Welcome to my website. I am a fourth-year geobiology PhD candidate at Caltech. I grew up outside of Minneapolis and attended the University of California Davis, earning a BS in microbiology and a BA in political science in 2013. After graduating, I worked in Jonathan Eisen’s lab, exploring the microbiome of the built environment (including the International Space Station) and publishing Swabs to Genomes, a primer on microbial isolation, extraction, sequencing, and publication. I went on to learn to code via a bootcamp and joined DoorDash as a backend engineer. 

In 2018 I began working at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI). I worked as a software engineer on the Data Coordination Platform (DCP) for the Human Cell Atlas (HCA), an ambitious plan to sequence and explore RNA on a cellular level. That work transitioned into the cellxgene project, building data visualization tools that allow scientists without a software background to interactively explore the full range of RNA expression data for hundreds of millions of cells. 

At Caltech, I'm building communities of microbes capable of efficient carbon sequestration at gigaton scale, and the company that will deploy them. My microbial experience drives the science; lessons in scalability and fundraising from the tech world shape the company. Climate solutions capable of scaling to an impactful size must consider long-term resource requirements at inception and ensure that they will not compete with humanity for already scarce resources such as arable land, fresh water, and energy. This shapes every design decision in my own system: saline ponds on non-arable land, fertilized by wastewater and powered by sunlight. The financial model is built the same way: scalability needs to be considered from inception, not bolted on. I'm working with material scientists and bioengineers to manufacture building materials from the generated biomass. This creates revenue streams independent of carbon credits in markets large enough to absorb the volume generated by gigaton-scale carbon capture.