About me

I’m a Native Hawaiian data scientist with a passion for creative problem solving. I was born and raised in the DC area, moved to Appalachia for undergrad, relocated to Germany for my MSc, then arrived in Western New York for my PhD. I’ve been all over and I’m excited to relocate again!

I love puzzles of all kinds, from wordy to crafty. I am a Scrabble champ, a NYT Games aficionado (Spelling Bee anyone?), crossword fiend, and my most common complaint about a knitting project is “too easy”. I have a Duolingo streak of 2300+ days and have now taken up watercolors. I broke my ankle bouldering, but I’m building up the nerve to try again.

Astrophysicists

I’ve written a brief list of resources and programs that have helped me on my astrophysics journey. Scientists don’t work alone, and I was able to do science because of mentors that believed in me and challenged me. If you need help getting started with any of the below, let’s work together and see what we can find!

• The Virginia Space Grant Consortium provides scholarships, fellowships, STEM programs, NASA summer academies, and more. Every state has one!
• Living Learning Communities can be a really great experience for undergraduate students. I really enjoyed my time in Orion while at Virginia Tech.
• Sigma Pi Sigma is an honor society for physics students.
• Research Experiences for Undergraduates are a wonderful way to get research experience outside of your home institution while an undergraduate. There are similar programs not funded by the NSF as well (NSF funded REUs require US citizenship, other programs may not).
• NASA internships are another way to get research experience for undergraduate and graduate students.
• The Honors branch of the Bonn-Cologne Graduate School of Physics and Astronomy is one of the few places you can get full funding as an astrophysics MSc student in Europe.
• The Kavli Summer Program in Astrophysics is similar to an REU, but for PhD students.
• The LSSTC Data Science Fellowship has taught me a ton about data science, programming, and computational astrophysics.