As a Jōdo Shinshū Buddhist, I was raised to respect and be curious about the natural world. My passion for the environment led me to earn a B.A. of Biology (with an Environmental Science emphasis) at Occidental College in Los Angeles, CA, where I graduated in 2021.
Urban Ecology Research
For three years at Occidental, I conducted computational biology research to investigate how the urban heat island impacts local salamanders. This research culminated in a senior Biology Honors Thesis, in which I explored how urbanization:
- impacts temperatures in microhabitats of salamanders (Batrachoseps nigriventris, the black-bellied slender salamander)
- and influences connectivity of salamander (B. nigriventris and Batrachoseps major, the garden slender salamander) habitat patches.
I learned and executed computational methods in R and Julia such as:
- downloading remotely sensed National Land Cover Data from the Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics Consortium to identify urban and rural areas in Los Angeles County
- building linear mixed-effects models using the
lme4R package - utilizing AIC/AICc scores and AIC weights to identify the best model among multiple candidate models
- building isolation-by-resistance models, based on circuit theory, to calculate resistance distance and quantify landscape connectivity of habitat patches and help predict wildlife mobility
Food Sustainability
In addition to my biology-focused interest in urban ecology, I am passionate about urban food systems, food sustainability, and food equity. For three years, I worked as a Sustainable Procurement Analysis Intern in Occidental College’s Campus Dining department. Occidental participated in the Real Food Challenge, a national campaign to encourage college campuses to shift their purchasing towards local, organic, fair, and/or humane food sources. To reach our goal of spending 30% of Occidental College’s food budget on sustainable food, I led a intern team of 3-5 students to complete 5 bi-annual budget analyses. We reached 29% sustainable food by 2019 and were on track to reach our 2020 goal of 30% before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Future
To continue to pursue my environmental and computational interests, I am currently a Master of Environmental Data Science (MEDS) graduate student at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at UC Santa Barbara. I hope to continue working in urban environmental spaces and utilizing data analysis tools to address issues such as food sustainability.
