My Story

I was raised in historic New England, finished high school on Florida’s Gulf Coast, and relocated in 2009 to my permanent home in the Pacific Northwest. As a former trade worker and the first in my family to graduate from college, I try to introduce lessons from my past into the visions I have for the future.

My career focus is on community planning to envision stronger and more equitable economic growth, cleaner natural ecosystems, and healthier built environments. My approach involves proposing multiple alternative future scenarios for the purpose of developing collaborative planning and design solutions that balance tradeoffs in land use decisions. I am especially interested in brownfields—abandoned and underutilized sites where redevelopment is complicated.

My doctoral work focuses on asking, “What design tradeoffs can be discovered from a multi-attribute visual preference survey of alternative future land uses?” A range of housing typologies, day-use facilities, urban agriculture models, and deployable infrastructure comprise my current focus on potential interim uses on brownfield sites. The goal is to inform a methodology for assessing the economic, social, and environmental tradeoffs and demonstrating linkages with community and regional future planning goals to quantify the primary decision variables most relevant among multiple stakeholders. This methodology is developed in hopes that it will allow us to recommend better policies, design-specific ordinances, and opportunities for co-location.

My key strengths include advanced GIS skills, expertise in land use policy and zoning, and ecological design principles and practices. I have experience with emerging technologies, project management, public outreach, and quantitative as well as qualitative research methods.

Ph.D. Committee: Rob Ribe (Landscape Architecture), Kory Russel (Landscape Architecture), Rebecca Lewis (Planning, Public Policy, and Management), Yekang Ko (Landscape Architecture)