I am really not sure why you would want to read about my gloating about all the cool/slavish things that I have done.  We all know that the closest thing to slave labor in our country is the employment of undergraduates.  I am now a grad student, so who knows what that means.  Your guess is as good as mine.  There is not too much interesting to tell about me. I was once normal, but have now descended into the depths of insanity with the torture/elation that is the life of the science student.

NEW So I have decided to put a few talks that I have given and a few papers that I have written for classes up here.

I keep getting questions of what my classes are like, and what sort of things that I do, so this seemed like a good solution to me!

So, I will give my degrees to start out with.

M.S. Geological Sciences, Indiana University, 2003,

B.S. Earth Science and Computer Science, U.C. Santa Cruz, 2001

Ph.D.: Well, I am at the University of Arizona seeking my degree in Hydrology and Water Resources and doing my minor in Planetary Science. I am doing research involving water on Mars, and it is a really exciting to be working in this field. With the amazing Mars Expedition Rovers (Spirit and Oppotunity), we have gotten back a plethora of data to work with. Mars is really an interesting planet to work with. It has, for instance, Valles Marinares, a canyon the length of the United States that is 10km deep! Possibly from this, you could have had floods as large as 20,000,000 cubic meters a second. This is on the scale of ocean currents! The cause of these floods would be volcanic eruptions melting subsurface ice! The biggest volcano in the solar system is close to that area, Olympus Mons. It averages 22 km tall. That is about 80,000 feet tall!! So, yes, I love Mars. But I will move on now.

So yes, now back to the beginning in '94 with me as a dumb kid right out of high school...

My first foray into the brave new world of physics was spending  two summers working on the MILAGRO gamma ray observatory at Los Alamos National Laboratory.  This is a water cherenkov detector that we were building in an old 5 million gallon pond at a geothermal facility. Thus the pond was filled with arsenic laced slime left over from the geothermal operations that was so nasty that we would find dead animals in it (this is lovingly pictured above). This slime ended up at a toxic waste disposal facility.  Probably not one of the most intelligent things that I have done, but hey, I was a 19 year old freshman, what did I know? (And nobody told me about that part of the position!).

Then I got a little bit smarter, and started signing up for  NSF REU programs which have to answer to the government!

The first was at the  Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics.  I worked on two projects.  I wrote a simulation in C of neutrinos scattering off of randomly distributed cosmic dust particles, as part of a novel idea to detect relic neutrinos from the big bang.  I also participated in research designed to assess the utility of Silicon Microstrip Detectors normally used in high energy particle physics to image soft X-rays, such as those used in mammograms and other medical applications.

My next summer was spent one summer working at Coastek Infosys doing software engineering developing proprietary network security software.  Of course I still can't discuss this since I signed my name to one of those happy little non-disclosure agreements that are so popular in Silicon Valley.  I could not find their web page, so I am thinking that maybe they died a terrible death.  It is not my fault, I swear!!  It is sad, they had some brilliant ideas.

At this point, I had already abandoned particle-astrophysics as being too abstract, and pretty much decided that silicon valley style software engineering was not a good fit either as it just did not seem to make too much of a difference in the world.  After searching around, I decided that Hydrogeology was a good fit, and switched majors.

My next academic pursuits involved  designing and building control and data analysis software for a cryogenic magnetometer for use in the U.C. Santa Cruz Paleomagnatism laboratory.  I also built data analysis tools for simulations of the Earth's Geodynamo.

Still awake?  Almost done.

My last summer as an undergraduate was spent at the Summer of Applied Geophysical Experience at Los Alamos National Laboratory, learning exploratory geophysical techniques, then at the Geofluids program at the University of Minnesota dept of Geological Sciences.  At the UofM, I worked on computational models of freshwater/saltwater migrations in the sediments beneath Nantucket island since the end of the last ice age.  I clicked very well with the professor, Dr. Mark Person, and ended up deciding to turn down offers from Stanford and others in order to work with him in Indiana on what I intended to be my Ph.d.

But then in the fine graduate school soap opera form, I left Mark, and decided to just do a masters at Indiana and switched and worked with Dr. Greg Olyphant at the Center for Geospatial Data Analysis at the Indiana Geological Survey. My masters research involved mapping and attempting to predict subsidence features in Indiana due to the collapse of tunnels in abandoned coal mines. I also worked on groundwater models which covered the entire state and determined the suseptability of each area to contamination, etc.

 

After finishing my masters at I.U., I participated in a NSF East Asian Summer Institute program. I was working at the Korean Institute for Geoscience and Mineral Research (KIGAM), interpreting groundwater data. Well, in reality I just proofread a lot of things that they wrote in English. They were an amazing group of people, and I had a wonderful time there in that country that I love so much.

Ok, I will stop now.  If you actually made it this far, email me and I will send you some sort of award that I am sure that you will promptly throw away.