I am a first year PhD student studying new ways to represent and estimate forest inventories in multivariate ways. My research interests include spatial statistics, especially as they relate to combining traditional statistical methods with impacts of scale.
I graduated from West Virginia University in 2019 with a Bachelor of Science degree in civil engineering. Upon graduation, I worked in the industry for a couple of years, gaining real-world experience in large land development processes. These experiences still inform my geographic thoughts in my current studies. I eventually decided to pursue my interests in spatial statistics in 2022 when I began my Master of Science degree in Geography at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. I graduated with this degree in the summer of 2024 upon successful defense of my master’s thesis, “A Multi-Metric Approach to Fay-Herriot Small Area Estimation of Forests”.  This work, and my current work towards my PhD in Geography, incorporate many auxiliary datasets to improve forest inventory estimates at various scales. As datasets and high performance computing become more available, I want to provide new, spatially explicit methods that will serve stakeholders throughout society as they aim to wrangle these datasets into better observations of the world around us.