Faculty and Staff Biographies

Research

Hello and welcome to my page.  I am a geoscientist with diverse research interests grounded in some combination of hydrology, meteorology/climatology, physical geography, and sedimentary geology. That being said, I think I have finally found my niche after many years of trying out ideas for better or worse, and it is: “past and present atmosphere-cryosphere-hydrosphere interactions”. The path I have taken to where I am today is rather meandering (no pun intended). I have always had an interest in hydrology and floods so I started there and then slowly worked my way into looking a Late Cenozoic alluvial fan and terrace sedimentology as possible indicators of past hydrological and climate conditions (Ph.D. research). That research moved me into the realm of fluvial and hydrologic responses to Quaternary glaciations and climate. I am still in the fluvial archive field, but have also done a U-turn and returned to modern flood hydroclimatology, specifically snowmelt-related flooding throughout Eastern North America, where I have active projects in the Appalachian Highlands and Great Lakes region. On top of that and over the past 10 years or so, I have been working primarily in formerly glaciated landscapes, so I became very interested in the sedimentology of Late Pleistocene ice-contact and proglacial environments and what they could potentially tell us about ice dynamics, hydrology and possibly climate conditions. Using the paradigm "the present is the key to the past", I have recently begun work on modern glaciers with dead/stagnant, debris-covered margins and associated proglacial fluvial processes from the Little Ice Age until present in Alaska as possible analogs for portions of the southern Laurentide Ice Sheet margin.   Finally and also in Alaska, I have begun work on climatological controls of glacial mass balance (glacial meteorology), water storage in snow, firn and ice, and the release of that water during the ablation season.