Greetings
I am a postdoc at University of Colorado, Boulder in Boulder, Colorado, and I am the first recipient of the Baruch Blumberg Citizen Science postdoctoral fellowship through the NASA Lunar Science Institute. My undergraduate degree was from Case Western Reserve University in May 2005, a B.S. in Astronomy (double minor, Physics, Geology). I received my M.S. in Astrophysics with a Geophysics concentration from the University of Colorado at Boulder in May 2008. I received my Ph.D. in Astrophysics through the Geophysics program from the University of Colorado at Boulder in May 2011.
My current postdoctoral work is a split appointment. 50% of my time is spent working on applications of my Mars Global Crater database at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at CU-Boulder.
The balance is spent being the Science co-Lead on the citizen science project "Moon Mappers" (for which my NLSI postdoctoral fellowship is). This is a web portal that shows volunteers from around the world high-resolution imagery of the Moon and has them identify features such as craters. My job is to manage the teams involved (science, programming, education, public outreach), interface with users, and to "do" science. I am situated at the Southwest Research Institute's Boulder location.
One of my research philosophies is that if you're going to study something, do it all, not just a little bit. To that end, my doctoral dissertation research was based around creating a vast, global database of craters on the planet Mars from which to extract various nuggets of information (more about that on my Mars crater research page). My main current research focus is using craters as tracers of planetary surfaces, their differences, and understanding more about the basic cratering process. At the moment, I apply these to Moon and Mars with the goal to expand to a more cross-planetary research framework.
I am also interested and active in the education and public outreach (EPO) part of astronomy and consider it a fundamental part of what a research scientist should do. My focus in this area is more of a sub-class of normal EPO as I am most interested in combating the bad science that is out there as it relates to astronomy, geology, and/or physics. I have given many interviews, public lectures, and planetarium shows on these kinds of topics, and I also write a blog entitled, "Exposing PseudoAstronomy," and I run the podcast by the same name.
Please use the navigation on the left to find out more about what I do. Note that the Research has several sub-pages to it.