About

I grew up in the small town of Philo, Illinois, just outside of Champaign-Urbana.  I developed an interest in studying weather and atmospheric science at an early age, becoming excited every time I saw a severe weather watch or warning for a nearby location on television.  My first scientific experience with weather came during middle and high school when I served as a Cooperative Weather Observer for Philo, relaying daily precipitation reports to the National Weather Service.  After graduating as the valedictorian of the class of 2008 from the High School of St. Thomas More in Champaign, I attended the University of Notre Dame.  There, I majored in my other great academic interest, Mathematics, graduating summa cum laude in 2012 with a B. S. in it, along with a minor in Theology.  I also served as a grader for the Department of Mathematics, grading courses in Real Analysis and Differential Equations.  My summers were spent working as a research assistant a the Midwestern Regional Climate Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

I began my doctoral studies at Purdue University in Fall 2012.  In addition to atmospheric science, I continued my studies of mathematics and statistics while at Purdue, earning a Graduate Certificate in Applied Statistics in 2015.  These dual interests in both atmospheric science and mathematics and statistics were reflected in my chosen research topic, low-order models.  My dissertation research has resulted in a poster presented at the 2014 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, an invited presentation at Notre Dame, and two publications in peer-reviewed journals.  I was also very active in graduate life, serving as the secretary of my department’s Graduate Student Association and on the Purdue Graduate Student Senate.  I received the award for Outstanding Graduate Student in the Atmospheric Sciences in spring 2016.