I grew up in Mound, MN, which is a western suburb of the Twin Cities. While most would consider Minnesota a cold and snowy state, I apparently wanted colder and snowier weather because I decided to head further north to Grand Forks, ND to attend the University of North Dakota (UND). I am an avid UND hockey fan and love heading to the games when they come out to play University of Denver or Colorado College in Colorado. Experiencing bitterly cold temperatures walking to class at UND certainly made me appreciate the amazing weather we have here in Colorado! I do have one lasting piece of home - I love shoveling snow and will choose to do so knowing that most of the time around here it will melt in a day or two!
I graduated from UND in the spring of 2000 and started working in the Research Applications Laboratory (RAL) at NCAR a few weeks later; I feel very fortunate to still be here 17 years later! I have been involved with a lot of projects in RAL over that time, including aviation weather, road weather, and numerical weather prediction (NWP). For each of those tasks I have generally been involved with statistics and performance assessment of algorithms or models. Currently, I conduct NWP testing and evaluation within the Regional Ensemble and Global Model Test Bed groups in the DTC. I have learned a lot over the years working with some very distinguished researchers at NCAR and NOAA.
I went to UND in pursuit of an atmospheric sciences degree and in addition came away with a future husband, Cory, who also works at NCAR as a project manager for the National Science Foundation aircraft. We have one daughter who keeps us busy attending volleyball and choir/orchestra events. We love to travel around our beautiful state and beyond. The travel experience I treasure the most to-date is spending time in Sydney, Australia and seeing the Sydney Symphony Orchestra play at the iconic Opera House. This is what inspired my 4th grader at the time to start playing a string instrument! In my free time I love to knit, having just finished my first sweater, and generally like to be outside hiking, jogging, skiing, dabbling in photography, or looking for agates to polish.
