I am from Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, home of the Lakers. My patient parents have managed to raise myself (the oldest) and my three sisters without losing their sanity (so far). I am attending the University of Oklahoma (OU) where, after recently earning my M.S., I am working on my Ph.D. in meteorology. My undergraduate alma mater is the University of North Dakota (UND), located in Grand Forks, North Dakota.


At UND, I studied meteorology and mathematics. I had many opportunities while at UND. Through Career Services, I enjoyed a cooperative education position with the North Central River Forecast Center. I was also active in the Regional Weather Information Center, a highly innovative program under the auspices of Leon F. Osborne, Jr.


In the Summer between UND and OU, I worked as a Research Experience for Undergraduates(REU) student in the North Dakota Tracer Experiment. That experience was invaluable, giving me exposure to numerous aspects of research meteorology.


As a graduate student in the department of meteorology at the University of Oklahoma , I have been supported through numerous means. Initially, a fellowship from CRAY Research, Inc. , administered by the American Meteorological Society (AMS) , kept food on the table. Since the end of that one year fellowship, I have been a graduate research assistant in the Center for the Analysis and Prediction of Storms (CAPS) , an organization concerned with the prediction of small-scale weather with emphasis on thunderstorm prediction. In a collaborative effort, I work under the Doppler Radar and Remote Sensing Research Group (DRARSR) at the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL).


While at OU, I have been very fortunate to be involved in many research ventures. In the Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes EXperiment (VORTEX) , I was a member of the Turtle teams. I also participated in the Measurement, Interpretation, and Ground Truthing of Hydrometeors (MIGHT) experiment. MIGHT was conducted to further verify the utility of polarization diversity radar to the deduction of hydrometeor (rain, snow, hail, graupel) type and amount within storms. In my master's research, I used polarization diversity radar to analyze the early behavior of an Oklahoma supercell.


For my Ph.D. work, I hope to utilize dual-polarization radar data to retrieve hydrometeor type and amount within a thunderstorm and to subsequently ingest that data into a numerical model. As hydrometeors are fundamental to convective storms, improved knowledge of hydrometeor fields at the beginning of and during a model run should enhance forecast quality.





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