Welcome! I’m an experimental petrologist / planetary scientist / volcanologist who studies igneous rocks at the small scale to learn about large scale processes. As an Assistant Professor of Geology at Macalester College (St. Paul, MN), I teach classes including GEOL 106 Volcanoes, GEOL 160 Dynamic Earth, GEOL 250 Mineralogy, and GEOL 302 Petrology. Some of my current research involves volcanic rocks from the Moon, and two of my students are working on samples from recent Hawaiian eruptions.

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 a space telescope (2020–2022). Now I’m looking at Moon rocks, exploring Minnesota, and setting up an experimental lab. 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.