About me

I’m a Native Hawaiian scientist with a passion for stars. I was born and raised in the DC area, moved to Appalachia for college, relocated to Germany for my MSc, then moved to Western NY for my PhD. I’m looking for a postdoc and hoping to relocate somewhere just a tad bit warmer…

Other than research, I also love crunchy snacks, travel, moving my body, reading, knitting, and making/appreciating all kinds of art. I learned German during my time abroad and nearly mastered German bureaucracy. I drink a lot of coffee and have strong opinions about the acceptable number of open tabs. I am perpetually looking for that one piece of productivity software that will magically fix everything, but I haven’t found it yet.

I’ve written a brief list of resources and programs that have helped me along the way. Scientists don’t work alone, and I am here doing science because of mentors that believe(d) in me and challenge(d) me. If you need some help getting started with any of the below, let’s work together and see what we can find!

Resources

• The Virginia Space Grant Consortium provides scholarships, fellowships, STEM programs, NASA summer academies, and more.
• 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.