I am currently a researcher at Rutgers University focused on developing statistical models of sea level over the 20th century. However, after a recent move back to Toronto, Canada I am interested in joining a company with a strong entrepreneurial spirit where there is an opportunity to have a real personal impact on the growth of the business.
I started my career in orbital dynamics modeling at Dynacon Inc, a small Toronto based engineering firm focused on spacecraft systems. There I worked on the attitude control systems for several satellites, notably NASA's ChipSat, Australia's FedSat and Canada's MOST. I then joined the Mission Operations analysis support team at MDA Space Missions for robotic operations on the International Space Station (ISS). At MDA I held a client facing role where I led the dynamic and kinematic analysis team for the installation of two trusses on the ISS. With an interest in playing a larger role within the development cycle of a product, I joined Gedex, an early-stage firm focused on geophysical survey instrumentation engineering. At Gedex, I developed the control system for a six degree of freedom motion isolation system for an airborne gravity gradiometer. This motion isolation system was an essential element of the instrumentation system that ensured the proper data collection by the gradiometer which was planned for a noisy aircraft environment. It was at Gedex that my interests evolved; while it was interesting to solve the problems necessary to design effective instrumentation, what I found truly exciting was the output of the instrumentation devices - the interpretation of the data. This prompted me to return to graduate school to pursue studies of data analysis methods within the field of geophysics.
In graduate school, I applied control and estimation theory knowledge to geophysical problems with large data sets. As part of my PhD in Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard, I have used GRACE, a satellite gradiometer to estimate the movement of mass, be it water or ice, around the planet and the impact on the Earth's gravitational field. An understanding of the Earth's gravitational field enables can be used to assess how fast the planet's ice sheets are melting, which is a direct effect of climate change. Additionally, my work also looks at a compendia of sea level records to evaluate sea level changes globally to add additional constraints to study how the polar ice sheets are changing.
A native of Bath, Ontario, Canada, I received my Bachelor's of Engineering Physics at Queen's University in 2000 followed by a Master's in Applied Science at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies in 2002. I registered for a Professional Engineering of Ontario license in 2008. I have received recognition from NASA forcontributions to the ChipSat program and was also a recipient of NASA's Space Flight Awareness award for work on the ISS. In 2007, I returned to academia and completed a PhD in Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University with Jerry Mitrovica in 2014. I have broad expertise in the fields of statistics, mathematical modeling, control theory, estimation theory, time series analysis, spectral analysis, spacecraft systems, sea level and gravity estimation.