I’m currently an Assistant Research Professor at the University of Maine’s School of Marine Sciences. I’m interested in biological oceanography and marine ecology (from viruses to whales) as well as applied and fundamental ocean optics - all within a broader Earth system science context. My work is often a combination of seagoing observations, satellite remote sensing, and lab-based analysis - all with a strong computational dimension. Some themes of my work at the moment include:

• retreiving marine particle properties from ocean color; including the use of polarization and spatiotemporal patterns to add more information to the inversion
• investigating optics of oceans on other worlds and what optical signals might constitue a biosignature on Enceladus or Europa
• studying marine biophysical interaction across trophic levels (e.g. frontal eddies in the Gulf Stream, patches of jellyfish in the Eastern Med, turbulent nearshore environments in the Gulf of Maine)

I work closely with the MISC Lab here at UMaine. If you’re interested in collaborating or working with our larger group at the University of Maine please feel free to reach out.

You can find my full CV here.

Background

I’ve just (Dec. 2024) finished as a Zuckerman Postdoctoral Fellow working with Emmanuel Boss and Yoav Lehahn jointly at the University of Maine and the University of Haifa studying questions of marine patchiness, connecting polarized scattering to particle properties in the ocean, and re-assessing the pros and cons of machine learning in ocean remote sensing.

In Dec. 2022 I defended my PhD with Dave Johnston in the Marine Robotics and Remote Sensing Lab at the Duke University Marine Laboratory where I was a Future Investigator in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST). My doctoral research primarily used satellite and drone based remote sensing to map coastal change, monitor megafauna populations, and finally to investigate submesoscale biophysical questions at the front of the Gulf Stream.

Before joining the Duke Marine Lab, I worked at Harvard University as a research technician in the deep-sea focused Girguis Lab, served a year and a half as Chief Technology Officer at WayPaver Foundation, and spent time at Moon Express as a Software Engineer developing their ground data systems and engineering team tools. I graduated from the University of North Carolina as a Morehead-Cain Scholar with a degree in Computer Science where I started UNC Students for the Exploration and Development of Space and researched computer vision.