About Me

I grew up in Chicago, Illinois and from a young age my  adventuresome spirit fueled me.  Surrounded by flatland  everywhere I looked, I turned to  sports to keep me active, although  my mind often found itself in the  mountains.  It would take me 21  years to finally live amongst these  geologic masterpieces, but since  then I’ve never turned back.    After graduating high school in  2011, I attended a small liberal  arts college in western Michigan  called Hope College.  It seems  obvious that I was meant to be a  geologist, however I didn’t take  my first geology course until my  sophomore year.  Starting out, I had planned to be a chemist.  After  a year of taking classes I found that although I liked chemistry, it  felt too small.  Through the advice of a professor, I took a field  geology course and I knew from the moment that I was handed a  hammer and told to put my nose against the rock I had found my  vocation.  Not wanting to give up on chemistry, I pursued a double  major and am happy to have a strong chemical background to help  me understand geology in a broader sense.    Geology took me to many different places during college, none  more significant than when I studied abroad in New Zealand for a  semester.  It was here that I truly fell in love with geology, utterly  fascinated by each and every outcrop I encountered.  I came home  and knew that geology would be my life’s passion.  Shortly after  this, I was given the opportunity to do undergraduate research in  Sweden with a small group of students and professors.  For just  under a month I did field work looking at Proterozoic migmatites  with mafic compositions in an amphibolite to granulite facies  transition region.  I studied correlations between the composition  of host rocks, the mineralogy of the metamorphic megacrysts, and  the composition of leucosomes.  Further analyses were completed  back at Hope College, all culminating in a poster presentation  titled “Megacrysts and partial melting of amphibolites from  Halland Province, Southwestern Sweden” at GSA 2014.        A few months after graduating from Hope College in 2015 I  moved to Laramie and started graduate school at the University of  Wyoming.  Here, I’m still studying metamorphic rocks, but much  lower-grade and much older rocks than I did for my undergraduate  research.  Despite my interest in studying metamorphic rocks in  graduate school, however, I plan on using my degree to pursue a  job in industry.          When I’m not studying rocks, I enjoy a variety of other outdoor  activities including golfing, hiking, and skiing.  I look forward to  taking advantage of the beautiful and adventurous setting that  Wyoming has to offer in the coming years!