I graduated from Central Michigan University with a major in meteorology (as well as geography and English) in 2000. I completed my masters degree from The Pennsylvania State University in 2002, conducting research under Dr. Jenni Evans on the extratropical transition of tropical storms. My interests lie in numerical weather prediction (a.k.a. modeling), tropical meteorology, climatology, and lake effect precipitation and clouds (particularly the Great Lakes), but particularly in the communication of our science to the public.

I attended the Research Experience for Undergraduates at the Oklahoma Weather Center during the summer of 1999, an experience that I would highly recommend to anyone thinking about going to grad school in meteorology. My mentor was David Stensrud at the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL). My research project, "The Relationship between Spread and Skill in Ensemble Forecasts" (in a mostly-online form), involves numerical weather prediction; I applied ensemble forecasting to Ed Lorenz's convective equations (ever heard of chaos theory?). In other words, I wrote a lot of Fortran that summer :) (and if you're going into research, get used to it). The people (other students, mentors, and coordinators) were AWESOME, the storm chasing was fun, and I learned more in a couple weeks there than I would expect in a semester!