Detailed professional information can be found on my CV.
I was born and raised in Clendenin, West Virginia, a small town on the Elk River in central West Virginia. Clendenin was heavily damaged in historic flooding during the summer of 2016. My high school’s building (Herbert Hoover, c/o 2010) and many homes and businesses were destroyed, making the already small struggling town even smaller. My favorite thing about growing up in Clendenin was having the Elk River in my backyard (the Queen Shoals river gauge is less than 1/4 mile down stream from us!) and a delicious hot dog from the local Dairy Queen.
A local delicacy, Clendenin Dairy Queen hot dog is pretty special, topped with ketchup, mustard, onions, chili, slaw, salt, and pepper (in that order). Ask me sometime, I’ll make a batch.
Some other down home treats I am always ready to rave about:
The pepperoni roll: truly the best ones were in the Kanawha County Schools kitchens, but a 2024 trip back east included a deep dive into roll research. GoMart-31 (yes, a gas station) in Kanawha City, the sketchy one, has some dang good ones.
Tudor’s Biscuit World: I will go to the ends of the earth for the biscuit.
I attended California University of Pennsylvania (CalU for short) to study meteorology (c/o 2014). California is a town in Pennsylvania, and no, it is not affiliated with the state of California or any university there. The CalU meteorology program is (was) pretty small. I graduated as part of a 4-person class. The size didn’t prevent me from taking all the necessary courses or having some pretty amazing opportunities to get involved and start undergraduate research. During my time at CalU, I participated in (and later helped teach) a storm-following field course and did undergraduate research via the NOAA Hollings program at National Weather Service in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Since graduating, CalU has merged with 2 other Pennsylvania higher-ed schools and re-branded as PennWest-California, and sadly the meteorology program is no longer a full major degree program after the reconfiguration.
I arrived in Norman, Oklahoma in 2014 to start a direct-track PhD at the School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma and doing research for CIMMS (now CIWRO). I was part of the OU-BLISS research group and my advisers were Drs. Petra Klein and Evgeni Fedorvich. I studied nocturnal low-level jets over the Great Plains using high-resolution observations and simulations. I defended my Ph.D. in fall 2018. As a grad student, I was able to participate in several field campaigns including PECAN, mini-MPEX, and Perdigão (in Portugal!). Field work was and still is my favorite part of my work.
After finishing grad school, I became a post-doctoral researcher at CIMMS (CIWRO) with NSSL. I stayed there for 1 year, then joined NSSL as a research meteorologist. My work focuses broadly on applying boundary-layer science to storm problems. Most of my work is based on developing, deploying, and then using the data we collect and from state-of-the-art and prototype observation platforms.
I arrived in Norman, Oklahoma in 2014 to start a direct-track PhD at the School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma and doing research for CIMMS (now CIWRO). I was part of the OU-BLISS research group and my advisers were Drs. Petra Klein and Evgeni Fedorvich. I studied nocturnal low-level jets over the Great Plains using high-resolution observations and simulations. I defended my Ph.D. in fall 2018. As a grad student, I was able to participate in several field campaigns including PECAN, mini-MPEX, and Perdigão (in Portugal!). Field work was and still is my favorite part of my work. After finishing grad school, I became a post-doctoral researcher at CIMMS (CIWRO) with NSSL. I stayed there for 1 year, then joined NSSL as a research meteorologist. My work focuses broadly on applying boundary-layer science to storm problems. Most of my work is based on developing, deploying, and then using the data we collect and from state-of-the-art and prototype observation platforms.
On a more personal note, I am a female scientist from a small town with a blue-collar upbringing, and I am a first generation college graduate. My significant-other, Chris is also a meteorologist, which makes for interesting debate at times. Thankfully we work on very different things. If I’m not in the office or in the field, you can sometimes find me volunteering at the National Weather Museum and Science Center, or hanging out at home in our pool in the summer or with our pets. We have a couple of cats (Margo and Arlene) and a dog (Sasha). I also enjoy reading, gardening, sewing, cooking, doing shoddy DIY projects around my house, and listening to too much news radio.
