Biography

I am an anthropologist, geographer, and Earth system scientist who uses methods and tools from the geosciences to study past and present human societies. I specialize in building models of coupled natural-human systems, focusing on the feedbacks between population growth, food production, and climate change over the past 10,000 years. My work has been featured in popular press outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, and Cosmos Magazine.

I am the Assistant Curator of Artificial Intelligence for Cultural and Biological Diversity at the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida. I am seeking creative graduate students and postdocs in geography or anthropology who want to use machine learning, agent-based modeling, and other computational methods to answer big questions at the intersection of the natural and social sciences. Please email me for more information on current opportunities in my lab. Please fill out this form if you are a student at UF and interested in volunteer positions in my lab.

Prior to coming to the FLMNH, I was a postdoctoral researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UCSD where I worked with Jade d’Alpoim Guedes to reconstruct climate during the domestication and dispersal of rice in east and southeast Asia, and at the University of Arizona School of Geography, Development and Environment and Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research where I worked with Kevin Anchukaitis to reconstruct hydroclimate variability in the western United States over the past millennium. I received my PhD with Michael Barton from the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University.

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