Welcome to my resumap - built using Mapbox!
A list of skills, capabilities, and experiences resume can only say so much.
My resumap is designed to illustrate my resume as well as to provide a fun way to help you get to know about my life and movements. 🚀
And I make maps - so I'm going to tell you my story using this resumap! 🤖
I grew up in a lovely small town called Whitinsville, MA, where my youth was filled with school, church, and family activities. In school, everybody did extracurricular activities - my choices were soccer, basketball, orchestra1, and choir.
For college, I followed my big sister south of the Mason-Dixon to the Commonwealth of Virginia. At James Madison, I was exposed to GIS for the first time and saw that it was a natural fit for my interests - geography, maps, and working with computers - Nice!
After graduating from college, I was given the opportunity to map clean water sources with a water engineer in rural Bundibugyo District in western Uganda. This exposed me to international development work and reoriented the direction that I wanted to take my career.
My first real job was a strange one - but perfect for me! I worked for a geophysical surveying company whose expertise was electromagnetic surveys as part of explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) on active or former military training sites, such as (former) Fort McClellan in Anniston, AL and (active) Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, CA.
Clark University, a small liberal arts school quite literally in my backyard, offers a unique program which combines GIS with international development and environmental science. I had a blast and was given wonderful opportunities
While doing my master's at Clark, I applied for USAID's Africa Bureau summer internship. I hoped to work on the South Sudan census but was offered the opportunity to work with CARPE, USAID's largest regional conservation program based in Kinshasa, DRC!
So off to Kinshasa, to collaborate with NGO partners on information management, mapping, and reporting. My experiences from that summer led me to shift my career to focus on international wildlife conservation.
Following my graduation from Clark, I had an awesome opportunity to work at the Okapi Wildife Reserve in DRC for a few years, working on landuse planning, biodiversity monitoring, and landcover monitoring. My role was to build the capacity of WCS DRC program to use GIS and mapping.
Amazing neighbors playing in the trees right above my house!
African grey parrots congregating at a forest clearing.
Had fun and loved living in the Pacific Northwest for 8 great years!
Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, a job opportunity arrived in DC - so my family and I moved to Maryland. I'm working for a USAID contractor and focused on education, economic growth, and communities in transition initatives in my new role!