Welcome! I’m an experimental petrologist / planetary scientist / volcanologist who studies igneous rocks at the small scale to learn about large scale processes. I’m currently an Assistant Professor of Geology at Macalester College (St. Paul, MN), getting a lab set up in between teaching Mineralogy, Petrology, and a Volcanoes course. After earning my PhD at the University of Hawaii, under the guidance of Dr. Julia Hammer, I moved to Providence, RI for a post-doc at Brown University with Dr. Malcolm Rutherford (2018-2020). After that, I was a 51 Pegasi b Fellow at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, taking my geological expertise beyond our solar system. I worked with Dr. Esteban Gazel and others to model how basaltic exoplanets might look from our space telescopes. Happy science-ing!

p.s. Wondering what the header background is? It’s thymol crystals growing in a thin layer between a glass slide and cover slip, under crossed polars. I enjoy watching them grow this way even more than in a watch glass.