Hi! Welcome to my website. I am a first-year PhD student in geobiology 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 millions of cells. 

At Caltech, I plan to combine lessons in scalability from the tech world with my microbial experience to build communities of microbes capable of efficient carbon fixation and sequestration at a gigaton scale. I strongly believe that 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 and fresh water.

Although I am just starting my PhD journey I have been fortunate to receive three fellowships helping to fund my work. I am a NSF GRFP recipient, a Resnick fellow and I received  the CEMI (Center for Microbial Interactions) fellowship from Caltech.