I graduated from University of California, Berkeley, with a BA in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics in 2003. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Davis in 2009.  I have been at SCI since my Post-Doc through my current position as a Research Scientist. Outside of work, I enjoy skiing, hiking, beach volleyball, and kitesurfing. 

My research has been focused on using the Morse-Smale complex to solve various analysis problems. Morse theory is a general way of thinking about the feature space of a function, and I believe we are just beginning as a community to see the potential impact of this kind of analysis. My principal research interests involve developing and applying techniques from computational topology to solve analysis problems in a variety of scientific domains. Some ongoing projects include analyzing neuron morphology, finding structure and defects in materials, understanding electron density in molecules, segmenting geological features, and computing topological descriptors of reactive materials. I'm always looking for new exciting problems and collaborations!