For opportunities to join my group or collaborate, see the 'Join the Lab' page or contact me directly for details on potential projects. I am also open to suggestions for new ideas!

I am an associate professor in the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at UC Santa Barbara, where I study tropical atmosphere/ocean variability, its responses to past and future changes in climate, and the implications for extreme weather and marine ecosystem impacts. The tools our group uses for all this are a combination of ocean and climate models, field observations, and paleoclimate "proxy" reconstructions.

I grew up in Connecticut, where I got my start as an astronomer! I did a masters in astronomy at Wesleyan University, then worked at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics doing support work for the Chandra X-ray Observatory Director's Office. Quickly realizing astronomy wasn't for me, I went back to school for my PhD, but again took a while to get "settled" scientifically. I spent some time in the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, then switched gears again to arrive at the Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences department at the University of Colorado-Boulder where I actually finished the PhD program in 2011.

After graduating from CU, I went on to do a postdoc in Hawaii, first at the International Pacific Research Center, then moving over to the oceanography department on receiving an NSF Ocean Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in June 2013. Around the same time, I was lucky enough to get an offer to become a project scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and moved back to Boulder in May 2014 t split time between work on NCAR projects and my NSF fellowship until 2017.

All these diverse research experiences have illustrated the value of interdisciplinary collaboration, which is part of the reason I decided to join the Bren School. Working on tropical Pacific climate variability and change lends itself to various applications across ecology, hydrology, economics and other social sciences, and I am always looking for new collaborations.

Information on our group’s current research projects, presentations, and publications are available in these pages. Also please feel free to contact me.