I am interested in the science of climate change and air quality. These days I mainly focus on particles, lately airborne bacteria, spores and pollen which may impact clouds and precipitation in interesting ways. I grew up in Northern California and I play the guitar and the violin. I love to go running, biking and backpacking and I’m pretty into fruit and baking and baking things with fruit in them.

When I was in grade school I fell in love with science and with Jane Goodall through her books about her work with chimpanzees. I was a rabid environmentalist from then on and desperately wanted to be a marine biologist. As a teenager I volunteered at a wildlife hospital in California where I confronted my fear of blood and deep-seated squeamishness. I fainted almost every day for a week while assisting with surgeries and bandaging injured animals. Eventually I was assigned the task of feeding baby birds with an eye dropper which required no particular skill and left me with plenty of time to contemplate alternative future careers. I knew I wanted to be a scientist and work in a field with a positive environmental impact. Chemistry was the perfect balance of a subject that I found interesting and could be applied to problems I cared about but which probably didn’t involve any bodily fluids. In college I worked mainly on water quality, in grad school I transitioned to looking at the atmosphere and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.