My passion is to explore and understand the important (but largely unseen and invisible) motions and interactions that occur between the atmospheres and surfaces of many worlds. I help develop and make use of a diverse range of scientific modeling and data processing software, which provide measurements and insight from the global scale all the way down to the very local scale (to study dust devils and the evolution of sand dunes, for example). With the help of those computer codes, huge amounts of high-resolution atmospheric simulation output or spacecraft data can be rendered into forms suitable to analyze and compare to measurements (from orbiting or landed spacecraft, telescopes, and in the case of Earth, from people, weather stations, vehicles, and balloons). I am currently a part of the PREFIRE team and a member of the CIMSS-Cloud group.
My trajectory into multidisciplinary science and technology endeavors began in second grade, with a simple astronomy book and an early personal computer. That snowballed into wide-ranging interests in both the natural world/universe and human ingenuity. In my later high school years, I expressly chose meteorology / atmospheric science as my college major primarily because it involved many technical disciplines: physics, chemistry, math, computers, astronomy, and even some biology. During my undergraduate college years at Valparaiso University I could be found at either the physics/astronomy department or the meteorology department, in roughly equal measure. I wanted to somehow do both, and more. In a stroke of luck, I was accepted for a graduate research assistantship at San Jose State University (SJSU), which involved developing (and using) a high-resolution atmospheric computer model for Mars.
After finishing my M.S. in Meteorology, I briefly stayed on as a SJSU research scientist, continuing collaborations with scientists there and at the nearby NASA Ames Research Center. In less than a year, though, I had accepted an opportunity to join the Southwest Research Institute office in Colorado as a research scientist. While there, my research and software development diversified to include Mars, Titan, Triton, Pluto, Venus, Earth, exoplanets, clouds, turbulence, radiative transfer, spacecraft mission support, and field studies. That particular chapter came to a close nearly ten years later, when I started working (remotely) as a research scientist with the Carl Sagan Center at the SETI Institute. My research continued, expanded to include subsurface water/ice numerical modeling, and progressively became more multidisciplinary and focused on surface-atmosphere interactions. Nearly ten years later, I began working for the Space Science and Engineering Center at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. More detail can be found here.