My current work focuses on increasing ABIDE in geoscience education, particularly in the field, and building relationships for future geoarchaeological research in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean.

I am also engaged in deep thinking about how we make the outdoor-world more accessible, interesting, and knowable to people–especially those who grew up without major access to the outdoors. I am interested in how we build connections between the natural world/geoscience, archaeology/the past, and the modern lives we live in the urban to suburban US. I am focusing on the importance of grounding knowledge (some pun intended) of the planet in hands-on, in-person, in-situ experiences of the world, with the goal of building deep, connected understanding, avoiding abstraction, and de-siloing information about our world.

My Story

I have always been fascinated by the interactions between people and the worlds they live in. I was privileged to grow up spending a lot of time outdoors, walking and wandering hills, beaches, and forests. I was also privileged to be surrounded by adults who answered my questions, supported my curiosity, and who shared a fascination for the planet we live on. In part because of this support, I have spent most of my life wondering about people in the past and how their lives from my own experiences in those same, shared places and landscapes. I first became interested in landscapes themselves, and geology, as the stage setting and prop table of the past; a way of checking or contextualizing what we know from other sources. Over time, I fell in love with the excitement of reading landscapes, the thrill of being able to imagine how a landscape formed, in Deep Time and in the more recent. I fell in love with the Earth as archive, as a fundamental shared experience of life on our planet.

For the last 10+ years I have taken on a multitude of different projects: technical geoarchaeological research projects to science communication content creation and project management, service positions with professional organizations, DEI committees and ABIDE work, fellowships, workshops, and communities of practice. These projects have all been fulfilling and created balance in the work that I do. However, I am currently in a phase of purposeful, intentional slowing down. While I continue to hold service positions and participate in other science-related efforts, I am focusing deeply on a few endeavors rather than trying to keep many smaller fires burning. While it may look like I am doing less than I was doing in the past, I am simply focusing on depth rather than breadth.