Data Science Institute

I am a biogeochemist and climate scientist working on the water and carbon cycles. This includes studying modern rivers and catchments, as well as the terrestrial geologic record (lakes, soils, and caves), to understand Earth system processes that link the biosphere, atmosphere, and lithosphere. The aim of this work is to gain a better understanding of how the Earth’s water and carbon cycles respond to forcings, including ongoing anthropogenic climate change. We are also working on the characterization and quantification of lithium deposits in lacustrine basins and enhanced weathering strategies for carbon dioxide removal. Our tools include geochemical measurements, field observations, reactive transport modeling, hydrologic modeling, and synthesis of climate model output.

I am a Filipino-American geoscientist from Bozeman, Montana. I was born in Europe and grew up in Hong Kong. In 2020 I co-founded the Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in Geosciences organization. Additionally, I was a founding Advisory Council member of EarthArXiv, a preprint server for the Earth and Planetary Sciences, in 2017. In 2019 I was a Republic of Philippines Balik Scientist at the University of the Philippines, Diliman.

Prior to Brown, at Stanford University, I received a dual BS degree in 2012 from the Civil & Environmental Engineering Atmosphere/Energy program and in Geological & Environmental Sciences (with honors), an MS in Geological Sciences in 2014 working with Kate Maher (Environmental Geochemistry lab), and a PhD in Earth System Science in 2018 working with Page Chamberlain (Terrestrial Paleoclimate lab). From 2019 to 2021 I was a Miller Institute and President's Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley working with Daniel Stolper (Stable Isotope Geochemistry lab) and Don DePaolo.

At Brown I am appointed in the Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences (DEEPS), as a Core Faculty and Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the Institute at Brown for Environment & Society (IBES), on the Executive Committee for the Initiative for Sustainable Energy (ISE), and as the Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility lead for LunaSCOPE (Brown's NASA SSERVI Team). I am currently funded by external grants from NSF, NASA, DOE, and the Heising-Simon Foundation.

How does your research, teaching, or other work relate to data or computational science?

I am currently part of several large dataset compilation and visualization projects in my field (of paleoclimatology), these projects are ongoing but would benefit from data science expertise going forward.  I previously hosted a Data Science Fellow in my First Year Seminar, I plan to continue to use the Data Science Fellow program in future years when I have computationally heavy classes with projects.