ABOUT ME
When people ask me where I’m from I simply tell them I’m not from anywhere, but I was born in Lafayette, Louisiana. When I was 3 years old my family moved overseas for 15 years. I became a global nomad, living in multiple countries around the world including Balikpapan, Indonesia, Jakarta, Indonesia, Houston, Texas, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the Hague, the Netherlands, and Cairo, Egypt. By living abroad, I was constantly adapting to various cultures and different ways of life. Learning to acclimate through diverse environments has helped me grow as a student and approach academic and personal difficulties with an open mind and the determination to overcome challenges.
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Hiking up Mt. Merapi in Bandung, Indonesia (2005)
After our first move to Indonesia in 1999, we lived in a compound on the island of Borneo. This is where my passion for the Earth was born. Living amongst wild animals, hiking active volcanoes and snorkeling around beautiful coral reefs as a child laid the foundation for my love of adventure and ultimately, geology. I’ve trekked through the Indonesian and Amazon Rainforests, and have experienced the great deserts and pyramids of Egypt. As a sophomore in high school (2011), I attended three schools in three different countries. In 2011, my family evacuated Cairo, Egypt during the Arab Spring/ Egyptian Revolution and lived as refugees in the Netherlands. During my time overseas I also learned conversational Portuguese and some Arabic. Throughout my travels, I maintained an athletic career and competed in track, basketball and cross country tournaments around the world. I also developed my passion for photography.
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Graduating high school in 2013 in Cairo, Egypt in front of the Sphinx and the Giza pyramid
Diving around a sunken WWII vessel in the Gulf of Mexico (2017)
Smiling with my horse, Lee, after a weekend of cattle branding in Raton, New Mexico (2016)
My academic interests in geology include geochemisty, geophysics, biostratigraphy, petrology, petrophysics and petroleum geology. I have worked on multiple research projects, attended various conferences and have been published in abstracts a handful of times. I completed my undergraduate thesis in metamorphic geochemistry, studying heterogeneous sillimanite grains from The Sawtooth Metamorphic Complex, Idaho. My thesis advisor, Dr. Barbara Dutrow, is an expert in mineralogy and metamorphic petrology and worked with me to complete this project before graduation. I presented my results from this work at the GSA annual meeting in October 2017.
Hiking to the top of Twin Mountain in New Mexico during the LSU Geology Field Camp (2017)
Overlooking a valley in Northern Ireland (2017)
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In August 2018, I accompanied the Planetary Science Lab (PSL) on their field excursion in Sri Lanka. I created the field plan for our group, and was responsible for all rock descriptions and field mapping over the course of our field work. I am currently doing a thorough macro and micro characterization of our serpentine samples to see how they vary across the island of Sri Lanka. I will be presenting my results form this work at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) in March 2019. I will begin my masters thesis in August 2019, but will be presenting preliminary results from my work at the AASP conference in Ghent, Belgium during July 2019.
While doing field work in Udawalawe, Sri Lanka, a local school was visiting our field site! This is because the area is almost completely devoid of vegetation, and local legend says this was caused by meteorites striking the surface. Our research group (center) explained the red soil was due to laterized hematite deposits. (2018)
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Currently (as of 2021) I am working on my dissertation research at the Center for Excellence in Palynology (CENEX) under Dr. Sophie Warny. My project integrates source rock characterization, thermal maturation, organic petrography, and biostratigraphy to reconstruct the paleoenvironment of an Eocene-aged deltaic system in SW Oregon in Coos Bay.