Hi, I'm Jessica! I'm glad you're here...

I created this website to introduce you to both myself and my research. Hopefully, I convince you to stick around and follow my journey through the highs and lows of academia.

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I grew up in southeastern Massachusetts spending summers camping down the Cape or up in Maine with my parents and three siblings. Occasionally my golden retrievers would join too! After high school graduation, I adventured to Washington, DC to study Environmental Science at American University.

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During my undergraduate career, I joined Dr. Karen Knee's lab to study how land-use intensification influences stream flow and water quality of three tributaries of the Potomac River, the primary drinking water source for Washington, DC. I worked with both Dr. Knee and a master's student at the time, Jacob Melone, collecting water samples for over two years. While I took primarily environmental science courses like climatology, biogeochemistry, environmental research methods, ecology, evolution, and more, I also discovered my passion for environmental anthropology and began to explore the connections between people and their environment. 

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I graduated from American University in 2017 with a B.S. in Environmental Science and minors in anthropology and statistics. I wanted to continue my passion for human-natural systems science and subsequently joined Dr. David Lewis' Lab at the University of South Florida where I completed my Ph.D. My goal there was to conduct interdisciplinary research combining methods from the social and natural sciences to more holistically assess key issues in freshwater health and management.

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For my dissertation, I investigated how shifts in water management policies—primarily related to cutbacks in groundwater extraction—altered the biophysical and cultural ecosystem services provided by freshwater depressional wetlands in the Tampa Bay region. While completing this project, I studied over 150 wetlands and collected surveys from more than 500 residents.

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In addition to my dissertation, I've had the opportunity to work on two projects assessing urban streams. I'm a Co-PI on the first project, which is sponsored by the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, and looks at disparities in the locations and sizes of urban stream restoration projects in California and Minnesota through the lens of environmental justice. For the second project, which was funded by the Environmental Protection Commission in Tampa, we investigated the co-occurrence of nutrient and microbial pollution as factors creating human health risks in urban streams.

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Since graduation, my husband and I moved to Vermont where I started a postdoctoral research position at the University of Vermont studying the social and ecological costs of flooding. So far, I've helped coordinate three focus groups and design two surveys, one for the public and another for experts, to help understand flood risk perceptions and flood mitigation solutions. This work is funded through NOAA's Cooperative Institute for Research to Operations in Hydrology (CIROH), which you can read more about here. 

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