Where are you from? 
I grew up in Everett, Washington – north of Seattle – but now I live in California. Never thought I would miss the rain!

What do you do?  
I work at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the Applied Science System Engineering group. That means it’s my job to understand the NASA missions and projects I work with and the data products they produce, with the goal of connecting NASA’s freely available data with users and organizations who can use it to help people in real life.

What missions are you involved in and how do they relate to GLOBE Observer?  
I work with the Terra mission – specifically for the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR), one of the five science instruments on the Terra satellite. I also work with the Airborne Multiangle Spectroradiometer Polarimeter Imager (AirMSPI) and the Multi-angle Imager for Aerosols (MAIA), which is currently in development. All of these instruments observe (or will observe) Earth, and are mainly used to study Earth’s atmosphere. During the 2017 total solar eclipse, MISR observed totality in Wyoming and Nebraska at the same time that GLOBE Observer citizen scientists in the area were recording how the temperature changed as the eclipse progressed. I used the data they collected to calculate how much the temperature dropped during totality in the area MISR observed.

What was your career path?  
I’ve always been interested in art, science, and writing. I have a bachelor’s degree in geology and a master’s degree in planetary science. My joke is that if you average Earth’s surface and space, you end up in low-Earth orbit. After I graduated, I worked as a science teacher and did a remote internship writing for EARTH magazine before I started at JPL.

Why is citizen science important to you?  
The part I enjoy most about my job is knowing that our goal is to use science to help people. Citizen science is such an interesting part of that because it allows people to take a part in helping themselves and others. Science has a complicated history – often, women, minorities, and non-professionals have made extraordinary contributions, but they sometimes didn’t receive recognition for their discoveries. Citizen science affirms the paramount importance of inclusion in science. 

What advice do you have for people just getting into citizen science?  
Science isn’t a set of facts or skills – it’s just a particular way of thinking about the world. Science is something that we can all participate in, no matter our background. With enough patience, and by working together, all of us are capable of understanding at least a little bit of how the universe works.

What do you do for fun? 
I spend a lot of time on the computer at work, so I like to work with my hands in my free time – baking, watercolor, stained glass, writing haiku and nonfiction. I’m still a geologist at heart, so I enjoy traveling to new places, particularly if there are volcanoes involved.

What inspires you? 
It’s so inspiring to look at Earth from space every day. Every day, I look at MISR’s images coming down from the satellite, and every day I see something I haven’t before, whether it’s an unusual cloud formation or the always-changing waters of a coastline. Sometimes the things I see are awful as well as incredible, like hurricanes and wildfires. It reminds me that there is so much still to learn about our home planet.

Any favorite quote(s) that you would like to share?

“You look at science (or at least talk of it) as some sort of demoralizing invention of man, something apart from real life, and which must be cautiously guarded and kept separate from everyday existence. But science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated.” –Rosalind Franklin