What the world sʇɔǝʅɟǝɹ. What our instruments preserve. What inference can honestly recover.

How I work

My background is mathematics and environmental data science, and I work on forests, fire, and water. I need to know why a thing is being asked before I am much use on how, partly because it changes what I build and partly because it is most of why I want to. The data usually arrives tangled: undocumented, scattered across sources, or answering a question nobody has phrased precisely enough yet. I take it apart until I can see the root, write down what I found, and put it back so it holds up for whoever needs it next. There is more detail in my CV and on the research page.

I would give my right arm for the simplicity on the far side of complexity.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Recent rabbit holes

LOC Lab

Forest Thermophilization & Disturbance Analysis

Pilot MEDS fellowship work building a national-scale R and Python repository, analysis pipeline, and apps for studying how U.S. forests are changing under climate and disturbance.

View project ->

WaVeS Lab

Satellite-Based Irrigation Mapping

Python geospatial workflows and segmentation experiments for tracing where irrigation expansion is actually happening across Sub-Saharan Africa.

View project ->

NCEAS Capstone

Wildfire Resilience Index R Package

Recent MEDS capstone work on a cloud-accessible wildfire resilience archive and open-source R package for querying, subsetting, and visualizing 100+ layers.

View project ->

The duck method

When I was a little girl, I knew another little girl who could draw a duck. I could not draw a duck. She appeared to possess some mysterious duck-drawing faculty that had passed me over. But I had seen proof that a duck could be drawn, so I kept trying. Now I can draw a duck.

What the duck?

I did not know then that it would keep happening. It starts with someone who can do a thing I cannot, and me thinking it is the best thing ever. Then I am aghast that I have not learned it yet. It is FOMO, but for skills. And so I go learn it, and usually keep going past what I set out for. I do that with most things. I did not stop at ducks; there is a page containing some of what came after.

This kind of can do attitudeFor a truly tragic lack of a better phrase. works on objects as well as systems. Sometimes the payoff is another ten years with a favorite shirt. Sometimes it is a better pipeline. Both need someone to stop and look before discarding, which the urgency pandemic of modern life trains out of us. That pause is also the subject of one of my poems, Urgency.

Quotes

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“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”

• Dorothy Parker

“We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.”

• E. O. Wilson

“Change happens by listening and then starting a dialogue with the people who are doing something you don’t believe is right.”

• Jane Goodall

“It is my experience that proofs involving matrices can be shortened by 50% if one throws the matrices out.”

• Emil Artin

“Documentation is a love letter that you write to your future self.”

• Damian Conway

“Statisticians, like artists, have the bad habit of falling in love with their models.”

• George Box

“With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.”

• John von Neumann

“I have no fear of losing my life-if I have to save a koala or a crocodile or a kangaroo or a snake, mate, I will save it.”

• Steve Irwin

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”

• Richard Feynman

“The real problem of humanity is this: we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.”

• E.O. Wilson

“Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.”

• W. Edwards Deming

“An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.”

• Niels Bohr

“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.”

• Lewis Carroll

“The climate has always changed. The difference now is that we are the cause.”

• Kate Marvel, Climate Scientist

“What you do makes a difference. You have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.”

• Jane Goodall

“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”

• Henry David Thoreau

“Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love.”

• Rumi

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

• Mary Oliver, Wild Geese

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.”

• Marie Curie

“A ship in port is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for.”

• Grace Hopper

“Study as if you were going to live forever; live as if you were going to die tomorrow.”

• Maria Mitchell

“It’s easy to lie with statistics. It’s hard to tell the truth without statistics.”

• Andrejs Dunkels

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

• Albert Einstein

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”

• Charles Goodhart

“All models are wrong, but some are useful.”

• George E. P. Box

What I'm Working On

Research Blog Art & Poetry

Elsewhere

CV GitHub Contact