About

I’ve been a data reporter at The Center for Investigative Reporting since 2019. CIR is based in California, but I work remotely from the beautiful Pacific Northwest.

a plant whose flowers are small, white, and bell-shaped, growing out of the trunk of a fallen tree covered in moss. A few of the topmost inflorescences are connected by gossamer.
I took this photo of what I believe is a three-leaf foamflower (Tiarella trifoliata), and traces of an arachnid visitor, in Olympic National Forest.
I’ve been working in newsrooms since 2016, albeit always primarily in the role of data reporting—specifically ETL, but sometimes visualization as well. Before that, I worked for Simple as a data engineer, and at Periscopic as an analyst focusing on visualization. I was still new to programming professionally then, but I still learned essential principles of data governance and communication.
I picked up R and Python for practical reasons: I was running experiments in undergrad that produced enormous datasets. In the image below, you’ll see an EEG cap with 96 electrodes, each of which took 1000 samples a second. Even over the course of the few minutes my experiment ran, the data added up quickly.
I'm seated and wearing what resembles a white swim cap, comprising a fabric that covers the entirety of my scalp and electrodes sewn into it.

Lest you think ill of the experimenter: This is a real cap, but I was not actually prepped yet! The cap would be aligned symmetrically and the strap fastened.

I’d been advised to work in a neuroscience lab before applying to graduate school, and not just for the sake of having it on my CV: I was told I ought to know whether I actually want to commit to 5+ years of it before I do.
I worked in a great lab with a lovely PI, but I saw how much I’d romanticized the work, underestimating how much of it was scrambling for grants and publications. I believe the incentives in professional science undermine the spirit and even the quality of work in favor of publishing an unsustainable rate of novel findings.
decorative vector graphic of a larch branch, serving as a text divider.
Two light brown weaver ants meeting in the center of a thin rope, communicating by touching antennae, with a narrow depth of field.

I took this photo of Asian weaver ants (Oecophylla smaragdina) having a chat in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Outside of work and studies, I most love being outside with a field guide (or two, or three) or being anywhere with a book (or two, or three).