Work Experience

A summer position as an Undergraduate Research Technician exploring relations between climate change and rapid urbanization. Projects included developing an API to fetch, format, and display geodata and relevant attributes from a large, dynamic data server, and developing a website utilizing the Tornado web framework to display climate data. In this position I was able to apply and improve my technical skills in the context of working with a large database involving geodata. Another focus was integrating into a European research project and collaborating effectively with German employees.

This position entailed four months spent in the Rocky Mountains with a crew of 11 people working on a myriad of conservation projects. We worked with different land management agencies including the US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management throughout the Rocky Mountains in remote backcountry locations within the beautiful states of Colorado, Utah, Montana, and Wyoming. Each project lasted between 1 and 4 weeks and ranged from trail construction to invasive species management to habitat rehabilitation. This experience involved spending every moment of every day in the wilderness and cemented in me a lifelong love of the natural world, along with a respect and fervor for the neccesary conservation efforts to preserve it.

A winter break Software Development Internship. My role focused on unit testing and analysis for a ray tracing system developed with Java. This position required close collaboration with fellow interns balanced with self driven solo work.

Two semesters of data work at the William and Mary Herbarium. Work projects included developing an image database for storing plant images with associated coordinates, basic database management using IrisBG, and transfer of woody plant species locations from dated paper maps into a modern GIS to survey biodiversity loss on campus since the 1980s.