Featured Projects
What does science communication look like?
Sometimes it looks like publishing papers and analyzing data. But it also looks like tumbling around on the floor with theater students and crafting 3-D collages with environmental advocates. With tools ranging from isotopes to improv and from pipettes to pipe cleaners, I have spent the past 15 years doing science, sharing science, and making science come alive for others. Below are a few of my favorite projects. I hope you enjoy them too.
As a scientist I work towards reason and understanding. As an artist, I strive to communicate that understanding in beautiful and thought provoking ways.
Art & Science
2022
Movement under the Microscope
In 2022 I brought a class of sophomore actors, a class of senior biologists, and their faculty together to co-choreograph a performance about how cells move. Inside our cells, bi-pedal proteins move cellular goods around on an elaborate, ever-changing highway of microtubules. These charismatic intracellular delivery drives so closely mimic our macro-scale motion, they are more easily understood through dance than data. ​​
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Watch a video of the performance here. Want more? You can also watch a student-produced documentary about the making of the project.
Read more at LSA Magazine.
2021 - 2022
Sugar Buzz
​After publishing peer reviewed journal articles in graduate school and white papers as an environmental consultant, I wasn't expecting my next co-authorship to be on a comic book. But when Dr. Monica Dus from the Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology teamed up with the U-M Museum of Natural History for her NSF Broader Impacts plan, I became part of the team designing and publishing a scientific discovery comic about how sugar affects the brain.​
Sugar Buzz is based upon work supported in part by the National Science Foundation, Award Number: 1941822.
2022
Converging Currents
"Spend the next 20 minutes creating something that describes your relationship with water." This was the first challenge posed to the 40 artists, practitioners, activist and academics who attended Converging Currents, an interactive workshop that built on the Museums, Libraries, and Environmental Justice project.
Part of the Ways of Water: Art, Activism, and Ecologies Symposium organized by the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design, our approach in Converging Currents asks the questions, "Can art help level the playing field in a room of technical and non-technical audiences? Can it help us establish shared values before entering into a conversation that might be polarizing or challenging?"
Building Community
2020 - 2021
Libraries, Museums & Environmental Justice
As an environmental consultant I spent hours online scouring state and federal databases for information about natural resources, permitting, discharge compliance requirements, water quality, and historical land use. There were no paywalls or passwords for accessing this data, but much of it was still difficult to find. I wouldn't have known where to begin without the guidance of seasoned staff in my office.
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The environmental data that helps people decide whether to drink their tap water or swim in their local lake should not be proprietary or cumbersome to use.
This fundamental belief about data access and transparency motivated me to team up with Justin Schell and apply for the Public Interest Technology Community Innovation Fellowship. Together we designed an online forum about how cultural institutions can support environmental justice work and facilitate better access to environmental data.
2021 - present
Undergraduate Community Engagement Projects
Students who do engaged scholarship and research are more likely to be successful problem solvers and professionals. That's why ​I take my students beyond the classroom, giving them opportunities that build their networks, strengthen their sense of social responsibility, expose them to different careers, and cultivate lifelong learning.
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This philosophy informs the format-fluid student-led community engagement model I use for ALA 270: Science Communication. My students have led focus groups with the Huron River Watershed Council to improve their teacher-facing webpages. They have crafted zines that summarize the City of Ann Arbor's 100-page carbon neutrality plan. And perhaps most importantly, they have learned to participate in equitable partnerships outside of academia that hinge on co-creation.
2019
Preservation X Transportation
Bike commuting to my job at The Grove Museum in Tallahassee, FL I became acutely aware of the connection between communities that preserve their historic places and those that are more walkable and bikeable. The LEED certified 200- year old historic site that I pedaled to every day I was living proof.
​Preservation X Transportation (a play on the famous music festival South X Southwest) was born out of a partnership with the ​Florida Department of Transportation, the Tallahassee-Leon County Planning Department, and the Leon County Office of Sustainability.
The event considered adaptive reuse and alternative transportation as two sides of the same coin - the currency of sustainable cities.​
Teaching
2019 - present
SciCommCourses & Workshops
Using the NSF Portal to the Public curriculum as a guiding framework, I teach science communication workshops and courses that focus on hands-on and inquiry-based learning.
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By weaving together my experiences as a K-12 museum educator, a private sector environmental consultant, an instructor for 5 field-based courses, and a laboratory manager, I can speak to the ecosystem of science learning. It begins with our earliest memories, becomes solidified in the classrooms of our adolescence, is reinforced through community involvement and civic engagement, butts up against our needs and values during adulthood, and ultimately finds its way into the fiber of our existence.
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As Science Communication Manager for the U-M Museum of Natural History, I help researchers at all academic levels consider and plan for how they will share their science with people at different stages of that journey.
2018. - 2019
Backyard Discovery
As The Grove Museum’s site Naturalist, I worked to deepen the Tallahassee community’s understanding of the 200-year-old historic site's natural history through education, outreach, and partnerships. In 2018, I launched Grove Museum’s first hands-on K-12 STEAM education program, Backyard Discovery. Backyard Discovery explored a range topics, including native plants, soil science, sustainability, the ethnobotany of Florida’s Indigenous peoples, the food-ways traditions of African-Americans from enslavement up to the Civil Rights Movement and forest ecology.
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​As educators we often measure success through metrics like grades, survey results, and number of participants. Facilitating Backyard Discovery was a reminder that the greatest success of all is sparking joy, wonder, and curiosity.
2013 - 2015
Environmental & Soil Science Courses
My teaching philosophy hinges on providing students with the knowledge and tools necessary to answer timely, high impact questions about their world and implement practical solutions. This means integrating field work into every learning experience.
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As a teaching assistant for SOIL 205: Introduction to Soil Science (Oregon State) and an adjunct lecturer for Principles of Soil Science (Florida State) my students explored soil structure and development by visiting road cuts, mountain sides, and soil pits. When I couldn't take my students to the soil, I took the soil to my students - collecting samples from entire 20 foot profiles for detailed investigation in the classroom. These excursions lead to rich discussions about fertility, land use, resource management, erosion control and carbon sequestration.
Research
2021- 2023
Biking for Butterflies
Now that my career has shifted away from research, I use community science to stay involved with STEMM projects at U-M and beyond. My favorite project to date blended my passion for science with cycling.
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For the 2021 - 2023 field seasons, I carried a sensor collecting environmental data (light, pressure, temperature) on three 150 - 400 mile bike tours. Sharing this data with the M3 Monarch Migration Challenge team allowed them to train and test machine-learning algorithms that could predict monarch butterfly migration routes.
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​As collaborating faculty David Blaauw (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) and Green, André (Ecology and Evolutionary Biology) explain, "Monarchs fly ~50 miles per day, a similar pace as a long-distance cyclist. Much like migrating butterflies, touring cyclists travel from one location to another. They make the perfect migrating monarch model.​​​​"
2015 - 2018
Environmental Monitoring
As an environmental consultant I conducted water quality, hydrogeologic, and ecological monitoring for natural ecosystems, commercial facilities, and remediation sites.​ During 1- week to 3-month field campaigns I sampled soil vapor and porewater, sediment, ground water, surface water, and indoor air. I conducted wetland delineations, surveys and site assessments.
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This exciting filed work took me into the remote public and private lands adjacent to the Florida Everglades where American crocodiles swam in the same canals I was sampling. I rode on air boats, slogged through waist-deep mangrove swamps, worked with drilling companies, hiked miles and miles of rural farmland and pulled groundwater out of monitoring wells in strip mall marking lots up and down the east coast.
2015 - 2018
Planning, Restoration & Management
My consulting work also allowed me to experience how science and policy interact in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors.
As part of the project team for the State’s Surface Water Improvement and Management (SWIM) program, I contributed to comprehensive management plans for six major watersheds across the Florida Panhandle. The SWIM program, assesses human impact to water resources, evaluates watershed protection and restoration needs, and selects priority projects for the ecologically, economically, and culturally diverse watersheds of Northwest Florida. In addition to characterizing conditions within each basin, I worked with co-authors to identify ecosystem services, identify funding sources, and integrate stakeholder feedback into the final documents.​​
2012 - 2014
Lichens that Fertilize Forests
In the dual major M.S. program at Oregon State I worked closely with three co-advisers in different fields; soil chemistry, forest ecology, and lichenology. Each discipline approaches problems from a different perspective, at a different scale, and with a different suite of analytical techniques. Consequently, my thesis projects were a well-orchestrated collaboration in which I learned the skills of each field as well as how to be a unifying link between them.
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For one of my two projects, I dove deep into the biochemistry of my first love in science: lichens. Nitrogen-fixing lichens like lungwort-lichen (Lobaria pulmonaria) take nitrogen gas (N2) out of the atmosphere and transform it into "fertilizer" (NH4). This "fertilizer" nourishes mature, old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest where other nitrogen-fixers are largely absent. But what limits this incredible chemistry and powers the nitrogen-fixing enzyme that makes it all happen?
2012 - 2014
Micronutrients in Oregon Forest Soils
From the organism level to the ecosystem level, nitrogen has been identified as the most important limiting nutrient for primary producers. At the same time that I was interrogating which micronutrients limit the nitrogen-fixing capacity of lichens in Oregon's old growth forests, I was also studying the same controls in cyanobacteria living in the soil. ​
Through a combination of techniques including sequential extractions and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP - MS), this project aimed to determine how nitrogen, molybdenum (Mo), and phosphorus (P) interact to constrain primary productivity in one of Earth’s most important carbon storing ecosystems; the Oregon Coast Range.
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These nutrients are sensitive to changes in soil pH and chemical interactions between organic matter and mineral surfaces. When micronutrients are available, N-fixers must "use it or lose it" in this chemically dynamic system.
2009 - 2012
Sulfur Biogeochemistry Research
Working as an undergraduate researcher and later as a lab manager for Dr. Lisa Pratt's sulfur biogeochemistry lab I participated in a wide range of projects with unique objectives and scientific impacts. Some projects targeted a specific environmental issue like acid mine drainage, some provided insights for understanding Earth's biogeochemical development through deep time, while others looked beyond Earth toward the possibility of life on other planets.
In the spring of 2012 I helped prepare Dr. Pratt's group for their summer field campaign as part to of the NASA-ASTEP funded project “Shallow-Borehole Array for Measuring Greenland Emission of Trace Gases as an Analogue for Methane on Mars” (GETGAMM). Although my role in GETGAMM was solely logistical and "behind the scenes," I was able to learn a great deal about organizing international field campaigns.​