I am from Ocoee, FL, a small town just outside Orlando. Despite growing up on a peninsula, literally surrounded by water, I did not think about pursuing water science as a career until I participated in research as an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I spent a semester at the UNC Institute of Marine Science field site in Morehead City, NC, where I modeled the interactions between sedimentation and oyster reefs and completed a collaborative Capstone project about the influence of canal system hydrodynamics on water quality. Being immersed in these research projects enabled me to experience how hydrodynamics can be used as a lens to understand patterns in an array of interdisciplinary topics. I also loved getting to spend time in different marine environments, from the middle of the Atlantic ocean to salt marshes and beaches on the coast, so this experience was foundational in leading me to pursue a career in environmental research.
Following my graduation from UNC, I spent a year working as an Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education postgraduate at the EPA where I supported the production of Integrated Science Assessments (ISAs), documents that synthesize and evaluate the science examining the health and ecological effects of air pollutants. My time at the EPA confirmed that I wanted to be able to design research projects to understand complex environmental processes and inform management and policy decisions, so I decided to pursue my PhD in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program.
During my PhD, I studied the hydrodynamics of groundwater in a North Carolina barrier island system in response to multi-hazard (waves, tides and rain) storm events. Residents of the Outer Banks are accustomed to flooding in their communities by storms, because the low land elevation of the barrier and proximity to the ocean, but they were puzzled by floods that appeared several days after a storm. These “sunny day flooding” events occur when the level where the ground is saturated with water reaches the land surface. My research improved forecasting of these groundwater-driven flooding events and expanded the understanding of aquifer-ocean exchanges. I also worked with the Town of Duck and the Town of Nags Head to design a community science phone app, iFlood, to collect reports of coastal flooding on the North Carolina Outer Banks and help the towns improve coastal hazards management in their communities. At Penn State, I am excited to expand the scope of my research to tackle interdisciplinary groundwater research topics from the mountains to the coasts and build new community-based research partnerships.
Research:
My research program focuses on studying how water moves in the subsurface. Groundwater provides an essential freshwater resource for communities, agriculture and industry, and supports the health of the ecohydrological system. I study the interactions between surface water forcings (e.g. waves, currents, tides, surge), climate forcings, morphological evolution, and groundwater dynamics which act on a broad range of spatial and temporal scales throughout the hydrosphere. Understanding these feedbacks and mechanisms is essential for predicting water resource availability and environmental hazards such as flooding, erosion and pollutant transport. I use both in situ field measurements (surface water, groundwater, atmospheric and geotechnical) and numerical models simulating groundwater flow and transport (MODFLOW, HydroGeoSphere) to evaluate these processes in complex environments from the mountains to the coasts.