I grew up next to a state park, and the outdoors has shaped me for as long as I can remember. I spent my childhood building forts out of branches and searching for bugs in the stream, always imagining a career connected to the environment. That thread carried me to Middlebury, where my first geography courses introduced me to GIS and cartography. I was hooked almost immediately by the power of visual storytelling and the way a map can take complex spatial data and turn it into something clear enough to change how people understand and respond to environmental challenges.

Spending my teenage years in Michigan, I co-founded The Climate Reality Project: Lansing Chapter at 16. Since then, I've backpacked for 90 days through the Western U.S. and Chilean Patagonia, studied geography at the University of Otago in New Zealand, and worked as a Geospatial Intern with The Nature Conservancy. Guiding trips and chasing my own adventures through wild places has put me face to face with the effects of climate change more times than I can count, but one trip in particular changed the direction of my work.

While on exchange in New Zealand, I hiked to Brewster Glacier with a few friends for a weekend trip, my first time actually touching a glacier. The meltwater pool beneath it was bright blue and ice cold, and standing under the ice arch felt like pure magic. A few weeks later, a friend studying at another university made the same hike and sent me photos afterward. The arch I'd stood under was simply gone. The glacier had visibly changed in the span of three weeks.

That shock is what pushed me toward remote sensing, wanting a way to actually see and measure environmental change like this at scale rather than just witness it once and move on. Back at Middlebury, I studied for my drone pilot license during weekly lunches with my professor, and that entry point into aerial data collection opened up a whole new set of tools, from drone-based LiDAR and multispectral imaging to satellite remote sensing, for tracking everything from forest health to glacial retreat to wetland change over time. I've since carried that work into projects with The Nature Conservancy, mapping everything from inoculated elms to climate-driven habitat shifts. It was the first work that felt like it was making a real difference, which is why TNC has invited me back this fall to study land use change in Vermont's river corridors and inform the state's Flood Safety Act.

Alongside that, I'm completing my senior capstone with the Conservation Law Foundation, using GIS and drone mapping to scope tire waste and 6PPD pollution in Vermont's watersheds.

I believe deeply in the power of mapmaking to tell these stories and help protect the places behind them. I make detailed, beautiful maps that combine storytelling, science, and my own outdoor adventures in service of conservation.