I am assistant professor at the University of Nebraska Omaha. I have wide-ranging research interests and previous experience, bridging structural geology, geophysics, and geomorphology. I use both field work and computer modeling in my research, and I find that the two approaches complement each other. My Ph.D. research focused on fault-related folding in the North Canterbury Region of New Zealand, and included the development of new methods and a computer program for fitting kinematic models of folding to data of several different types. My subsequent work has focused on data inversion and machine learning in structural geology, near-surface geophysics in the critical zone, and landscape evolution modelling. Broadly, I study processes spanning from the Earth's surface to the base of the brittle crust. These outer layers of the earth are critically important to humanity as the regions within which we encounter natural hazards, develop natural resources, and share space with our natural environment.
I completed my B.A. at Williams College in Massachusetts, where I majored in both geoscience and astrophysics, and I received my Ph.D. from Penn State, in the Department of Geosciences. After that, and before coming to Omaha, I worked as an adjunct instructor and then a postdoc for several years at multiple institutions in Pennsylvania, Norway, France, and Scotland.
For more about my research projects, see my Research page, and for a list of my publications, see my Google Scholar profile or my C.V. For computer code developed during my research see my Github page.