I study climate change in the tropics, both ancient and modern. I research why rainfall has changed over geologic time (e.g., hundreds of thousands of years ago) and how it is changing today. In my free time, I am a singer/songwriter and guitar player. I also enjoy yoga, hiking, and hanging out with my cat Iggy.

I had almost no interest in science as a kid– I wanted to be a poet or some other kind of writer! But in my senior year of high school, I took an A.P. Environmental Science class where we designed our own research projects. Every morning before school, I would visit the tidepools at a marine preserve near my hometown of San Francisco, CA, and soon I fell totally in love with observing the natural environment. In college, I majored in Environmental Science and dabbled in ecology, climatology, and policy. After I graduated, I took a job as a research coordinator for a sustainable international development program. I then spent a lot of time talking to farmers in East Africa about how the rains were changing… and I couldn’t help but wonder whether this had happened in the past. I decided to switch careers and go to graduate school to study the historical climatology (paleoclimatology) of East Africa and other tropical regions. And here I am!