Geospatial Informatics
My research actively works to develop new geospatial methods for archaeological analyses, including GIS, remote sensing, and spatial statistical techniques for landscape studies.
Human-Environmental Dynamics
My work seeks to further our understanding of the relationship between human and environmental systems, particularly the feedback between human behavior and ecological impacts over long periods of time.
Landscape Historical Ecology
My work focuses primarily at the landscape scale, where I am interested in understanding long-term relationships between sociopolitical, socioeconomic, and environmental/climatic systems.
Brief Biography
I am an archaeologist specializing in remote sensing applications and human-environmental interaction. I am currently appointed as a postdoctoral research fellow at Columbia University's Climate School with support from the National Science Foundation. I earned my Ph.D. in Anthropology from The Pennsylvania State University in May of 2022. My research primarily focuses on human responses to hypervariable conditions. In particular, I'm interested in how societal actions can influence environmental systems, and how people are impacted by unpredictable climatic conditions. Most of my research focuses on island and coastal regions and makes use of geospatial methods (e.g., remote sensing, GIS, network analysis) in conjunction with archaeological, ethnographic, and paleoecological data. Ultimately, my work seeks to further our understanding of how people interact with and are affected by their environment. My ongoing research seeks to understand the role that socioeconomic strategies play in long-term ecological change across landscapes. Specifically, my postdoctoral research focuses on how ecological systems are impacted by foraging, pastoralism, and agricultural activities.
My work incorporates many different geospatial methods and technologies like remote sensing and GIS and uses theoretical perspectives from behavioral ecology, complex adaptive systems, and evolutionary ecology. Most of my work centers on island and coastal regions and seeks to further our understanding of the long-term impacts of human settlement and livelihood strategies. My doctoral dissertation developed a novel framework for conducting settlement archaeology that involved a multiproxy approach to understanding behavioral drivers and feedbacks of human settlement choices on socioecological systems. This project also saw the development of a number of methods for landscape archaeological investigation on Madagascar and helped to establish linkages between environmental conditions and human settlement patterns in Southwest Madagascar.
My research has been funded by a number of agencies, including the National Science Foundation and National Geographic, and has been published in top-ranking scientific journals across multiple disciplines including archaeology, ecology, and geoscience. I currently serve on the Editorial Board of Archaeological Prospection.
Education
2022 - Ph.D. Anthropology, The Pennsylvania State University
2018 - M.A. Anthropology, Binghamton University
2017 - B.S. Anthropology, Binghamton University (concentration in Archaeology)
2017 - B.A. Geography, Binghamton University (concentration in Computer Applications for Human Environmental Analysis)
Lab Affiliations
Olo Be Taloha (African Environmental Archaeology) Laboratory, Columbia University (PI: Kristina Douglass)
Institutional Affiliation
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Columbia Climate School, Columbia University
