osage orange fights, firefly capturing, the smell and taste of honeysuckle, long dirt roads, goats' milk, the warmth of a horse's bare back, oyster beds, sonic booms: my childhood on the Chesapeake Bay. I grew up on a back-to-the-land farm structured by my mother’s love of the Whole Earth Catalog and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and my father’s spacecraft missions (e.g.; five lunar orbiters, Viking, HALOE) as one of the first aerospace engineers hired by NASA and his career span through the height of the Cold War era.
shuttling between New York, Paris, and South Beach: my formative years. as a model I worked for magazines such as Marie Claire, Mademoiselle, Elle, Cosmopolitan, and Spin and did campaigns for Bulgari, Estee Lauder, and others. It was both a wonderful and terrible way to make a living; it did allow for a lot of travel, which is something I relish. some recent travels have been to Bhutan and Everest base camp (Tibet side), and Borneo to see some remarkable caves and climb Kinabalu.
books. study. excavation. Amazonia, Antarctica, Athens, Belize, El Salvador, Hawaii, Panama, Papua New Guinea: my earlier archaeological and ethnographic fieldwork. I have some unfinished research into apocryphal eruptions of Merapi volcano on Java and in Latin America and their impact on archaeological interpretations. I'm also keen to pick up on a thread of my Wenner-Gren and Fulbright-funded doctoral fieldwork in Panama to focus on obsidian sourcing and further oral history work. I am the Principal Investigator for a National Geographic grant to examine archaeological and geoheritage in Patagonia at Chaiten, Chile. through this and with a fantastic, transdisciplinary team I am examining a rock art cave in a context of repeated volcanic events and extreme sea-level change.
my research focuses on disaster, perception, and environmental change over the very long term in human history. as an archaeologist, I use volcanism as an example of dramatically mutable environments that humans have experienced for millions of years. contemporary climate change, nuclear power, and space exploration form underlying themes in my current work. I find the Earth sciences and social sciences indivisible.
I'm currently the Scientific Director of an interdisciplinary art-science initiative called WetLab and teach environmental science entwined with many other things at the Gallatin School of New York University. I take delight in the creativity and the utter disrespect for disciplinary boundaries that characterize Gallatin students and faculty. I’m especially proud of the participatory (or citizen) science fieldwork my intrepid and adventurous NYC Coastlines: Past, Present, Future students did in the strange, COVID Fall 2020 semester. I additionally serve as Engineering Writing Fellow for The Cooper Union and on the advisory boards for The Harbor School Marine Biology Research Program, the Chaiten site museum (Chaiten, Chile), and a multidisciplinary journal for art, design, and science called .able for which I am also an editor.
one frustration I have with academic writing entails the inability to fully embrace or incorporate the quirkiness and creativity entailed in the interface between humans and the natural world. my work has intersected with contemporary art in recent years in ways that have have been highly meaningful for me as an outlet for some of these desires. I will provide a thorough treatment of these ongoing collaborations on this site at some point. One of my favorites, a live performance with audiovisual called hand held lava, is encapsulated in this essay, as a teaser.
45 (and counting) marathons run on 4 continents to date, including the [kind of hard to book] Antarctica and Great Wall of China races but excluding any [relatively easy to book] races in South America or Australia despite having spent a fair amount of time on each of those continents. Kilimanjaro is next on my list for international marathons. I completed my 18th NYC marathon in 2023. For however long as the Staten Island start line stays above sea level I plan to run the NYC marathon each year. In 2023 I ran my 3rd Boston marathon and should probably just keep running them whenever I qualify, even though I think winter training gets zero stars.
I completed my PhD at Columbia then taught at Brown and Stanford. I’m beginning new work with the WAVE: SPICE (Warnings and Alerts during Volcanic Emergencies: Scientific Practice Informed by Community Experience) consortium with a focus on the Pozzuoli area of Naples and Campi Flegrei caldera. I believe strongly in its interdisciplinary focus on entwining predictive sciences, study of the past, and the arts to communicate environmental risk to communities regarding environmental events and changes.
should you have an interest, my academic cv contains links to some of my scholarly publications. I try to keep it up to date but sometimes it lags, admittedly, so pls ask if you need an updated one or a distilled resume that isn’t in the archaic academic multi-volume style.
I am active in trying to convey archaeological perspectives on environmental disasters outside of academia, such as I did in the symposium on environment by the Petzel Gallery in New York titled, 'We need to talk'. I was interviewed about the fissure eruptions in Hawaii and some of my thoughts about nature-culture and the double-edge sword of creation and destruction that volcanism represents, which you can read here along with interesting thoughts from other researchers. And this piece from Gizmodo Earther folds together some of my thoughts with those of some favorite volcano researchers regarding why people choose to live near volcanoes.
I'm proud to be in remarkable and inspiring company in this blog post encouraging women to enter the Earth sciences: It's all for you, girl! as well as to have a mention and photo in Scientific American's 'How to find a woman scientist' discussion of a new database that seeks to fight the poor visibility of women in STEM and advocates for diversity and equity in the sciences.
THIS AND THAT:
Scope Magazine, which covers research at NYU, featured my research in their May 2023 issue with the title, ‘Disaster Artist.’
Art Papers published a Part I of an interview with me about volcanoes, art, and climate change. They then were kind enough to publish a Part II.
I was delighted to serve as a co-director of the New York Virtual Volcano Observatory (VVO) on Governor’s Island, where in a non-COVID world you could touch volcanic rock samples from the massive magmatic event that set the stage for the rise of the dinosaurs, see thin sections and digital renderings of volcanic materials, and experience Virtual Reality and drone imagery of volcanoes around the world. Because of COVID, for the 2020 season we were proud to instead give art residencies in the space to artists Jemila MacEwan (who created Dead Gods, which links to volcanism’s connection to the formation of early life forms) and Nooshin Rostami (who created ‘rocks that carry light’). We had public programming again in 2021 that was modified around the need for distancing and again for the 2022 season with a bit more normalcy. For 2023, the Virtual Volcano Observatory moved to Rutgers University. Look for more details to come!
With new media collaborator Andres Burbano, I had an immersive art-science video piece called 'Double-Sided Immersion' at the ZKM gallery in Karlsruhe, Germany as part of the 'Critical Zones: Observatories for Earthly Politics' show curated by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (July 24, 2020-Jan 2022). Due to COVID19, the physical opening of the show at ZKM was postponed and a ‘virtual opening’ prompted us to create a 4-part immersive streaming piece that allows you to move over a volcano during and after eruption, enter a prehistoric rock art cave, and then travel to Mars - Topography-Time-Volcano (or see here). I gave a talk and then took questions from Bruno Latour as part of the ‘Critical Zones’ Virtual Streaming Festival on May 23, 2020; you can see the full line-up at the Critical Zones program page and view the video on YouTube. Andres Burbano and I discussed our collaboration on June 18, 2020 though the Terrestrial University organized by ZKM in a talk titled ‘Of Volcanoes and Immersive Technology’. I spoke to the Greenpeace Schools for Earth group on July 15, 2021 at ZKM about the work; video here.
I was interviewed for this New York Times Science article by Katherine Kornei titled, ‘Ancient Rome was teetering. Then a volcano erupted 6,000 miles away’. [synopsis: we should all pay attention to the threats we haven’t considered].
I was the volcano expert on a kids' game show created by Disney+ tv, called 'The Big Fib' that teaches scientific information as well as critical thinking in Season 1/Episode 4 (‘Bees & Volcanoes’), should you be into watching adults covered in soap foam by smart kids learning that they need to use discernment when given information.
I was honored to receive a creative commission for the Creating Earth Futures initiative from the Royal Holloway Centre for Geohumanities to collaboratively examine the entanglement of narratives of volcanoes with social upheaval and climate changes during my fieldwork in Patagonia. The work created through this by artist Caitlin Berrigan was well reviewed by ArtForum.
I’m always happy for new collaborations and conversations.
IMAGE CREDITS: the images on the home/gallery page are all taken by me. for one reason or another each one is meaningful to me. they will change at whim, somewhat like their meaning. do scroll through them and feel free to ask me about them.