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Ph.D. Research Poster

Master's Thesis Manuscript

Master's Thesis Defense Video

Biography

I grew up in Bakersfield, a central California city with a desert climate. While there, I developed an interest in the special relationship between temperature and its effects on physiology. This would eventually lead to my pursuing an academic career. In 2015, I earned a BS in biology minoring in chemistry from California State University, East Bay. My interests had specialized to the effects of global warming on organismal physiology, and I pursued my studies as a master's student at the Estuary and Ocean Science Center, San Francisco State University's marine lab on the bay. Advised by Dr. Jonathon Stillman and Dr. Alex Gunderson, I created a species distribution model to predict the distribution of an intertidal population of porcelain crabs under future global warming scenarios. The agent-based model was simulated in conjunction with temperature frequency distribution models I generated from a real long-term environmental dataset. The thermal sensitivity response of this population under extreme environments opened my eyes to a whole new world. After earning an MS in marine science, I joined the Ph.D. program and Alternative Earths Astrobiology Center with Dr. Stephen Kane at UC Riverside to explore research in this new world.

Some of the most extreme and strange environments we are learning about today are those on exoplanets, planets found outside of our solar system. Exoplanets exhibit a diversity of environments ranging from hellish hot giants to frozen icy worlds. Many exoplanets, however, are thought to be Earth-like, terrestrial worlds with the potential to be habitable. Currently, our knowledge about these exoplanet climates is limited. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) missions will allow us to more closely probe the atmospheres of thousands of exoplanets. These atmospheric measurements will allow us to speculate on the habitability of such planets. Armed with data from TESS, JWST, and other future missions, I endeavor to explore the potentially habitable worlds in one of the first interdisciplinary projects in astrobiology between exoplanet science and ecophysiology.

I currently work on an astroecology model which convolves output from a general circulation model (GCM) and a meta dataset of empirically derived thermophysiological constraints for terrestrial organisms to create an ecological niche model. The GCM, Resolving Orbital and Climate Keys of Earth and Extraterrestrial Environments (ROCKE-3D), is coupled with the meta dataset, The Biokinetic Spectrum for Temperature, within the individual-based modeling software, NetLogo. The potential of this model is to predict the most promising candidate exoplanets with the possibility of hosting life (details in the poster linked above). Stay tuned!