Have you always wanted to work at NOAA as a CDR specialist? Can you tell us about your journey to this career path?
I never would have pictured myself working with NOAA, let alone working on supporting research for climate solution technologies like Carbon Dioxide Removal. At the same time, this position feels in many ways as though I have come full circle. I grew up spending a lot of time close to the Earth and ocean, and my parents were firefighters. This combination made me increasingly aware of the effects of climate change on my hometown.
During my high school years, California was struggling with one of its most persistent droughts, and I witnessed two wildfires engulf many parts of my community, likely due to how dry our environment was. I was in my high school newspaper and would spend lots of time writing about climate and environmental policy, which is what I thought I wanted to study in college. I arrived at a very conservative college and realized that not many people wanted to engage in conversations about climate and the environment, as they thought none of it was real or troublesome. This motivated me to take a climate-related lab science, Geology, and after my first midterm, I realized I was hooked on science. I loved the way Geology challenged my brain to think about ten different concepts at once; holding chemistry, physics, biology and geologic time all at once in order to understand one concept. In learning about geology and past climate change, I was able to articulate why what is happening today is so different than what happened in the past and how that affects us as humans.
