Environmental Health Scientist
About Me
Academic
Background
I began studying household air pollution and the potential for cleaner cooking to improve well-being around the world while an undergraduate at Yale University where I worked as a research assistant for three years with Dr. Rob Bailis. In Honduras, I surveyed households to better understand household energy use patterns, especially with respect to their use of firewood for cooking. My initial focus was on firewood collection patterns --where people got firewood from, how frequently they got firewood, and how much they got -- to understand if household firewood use was a driver of deforestation in the area. Later, I aided in exploratory research in rural India in preparation for a large-scale randomized controlled trial.
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After college, I worked for the Berkeley Air Monitoring Group assessing the sustained use of improved cookstoves in Peru and in Honduras measuring the impacts of improved biomass-burning stove on household air pollution in collaboration with local and international non-governmental organizations.
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While at Columbia University working towards my PhD in Environmental Health Sciences, I worked on a range of projects, including assessments of the association between asthma symptoms and emergency department visits and hospitalizations among adolescents in New York City, the impacts of NYC's Clean Heat Plan on indoor and outdoor air quality in apartments in northern Manhattan, the determinants of clean cooking fuel adoption and use in rural India, the impacts of clean cookstove interventions on air pollution exposure, birth outcomes, and early child health outcomes in a large randomized controlled trial in rural Ghana, and analysis of cooking fuel use and air pollution exposure patterns in Ecuador after decades of subsidized cooking gas.
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At Stanford, as a part of the Environmental Change and Human Outcomes Lab, I worked on understanding the health and climate benefits of clean-to-cleaner fuel transitions (e.g., from gas to renewable-based electricity) using Ecuador's ongoing promotion of induction stoves to replace gas cooking and also the health impacts of wildfire smoke pollution and coincident elevated temperatures in the US.
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I joined the faculty of UCSD in Summer 2023, and since then have focused on examining the health effects of environmental exposures, teaching at HWSPH and UCSD, and developing interdisciplinary collaborations across UCSD for future proposals.
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Interests
I grew up in southern Indiana, spending a lot of time exploring in the woods and playing baseball and soccer. Now, I am an avid disc golf player and a fan of games and puzzles in general. I have two cats who comprise the majority of my photo roll. In Northern California, I enjoyed areas north of the Bay Area like Bodega Bay, Point Reyes, and the rolling hills of Sonoma County. I am passionate about data viz (i.e., spend too much time on figures). Now in southern California I am enjoying the beautiful sunshine, lovely neighborhood full of friendly outdoor cats, and am trying to get into biking.
Friends of the team
Over the years and across the countries I've encountered many cute and helpful animals while doing field work and data collection. Here are some of them.