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Where are you from?

I grew up in Salt Lake City in Utah and I did my undergraduate at the University of Utah where I majored in Chemical Engineering, which I am also doing my degree at CU Boulder in. I spent my childhood just getting to hike, and ski and play soccer, I was really lucky. I got to be outside a lot, that helped my interest in science and the natural world.

What did you like to do as a kid?

Soccer was my biggest activity as a kid, I played every day after school and usually one or two days on the weekend. I loved it and I made some really good friends. It was a great trial for engineering – you have to work on a team, you have to communicate well, and you have to let your ego be at the wayside, and it was also just super fun. I got to go to southern Utah, and sometimes places in Idaho to play tournaments. The coaches always told me “You are going to miss this when you grow up” and I didn’t believe them, but I totally do!

What did you want to be when you were growing up?

I loved reading fantasy and Sci-fi novels, and that made me want to be a writer, but I also loved my science classes, which made me think I wanted to be a doctor. I took a bio class in high school that really engaged me. I was caught between English literature and science. I enjoyed chemistry, but my biology high school teacher was really dynamic and would do these beautiful chalk board drawings that really captured my attention. I was also one of those kids that wanted to do stuff that I enjoyed, rather than anything specific career-wise. My Dad was super supportive about education and always supported me when it came to my academic goals.

What are your hobbies now?

I enjoy running – I got so used to having activity everyday through soccer that when I stopped playing in college, I really missed it and realized that it was something valuable in my day, so I found running to be a good way to meet that need. I love to climb and I still love to ski, both cross country and downhill. Getting outside helps me stay focused and motivated for my research, because it can be easy to get disconnected when I’m in an office all day. I got into baking sourdough bread in college, and that has become something that I do pretty consistently. A friend of mine is a great potter and I have recently been taking a few classes with her. My research is computational, so having that very hands-on tactile experience, that is not screen-based, is really nice. 

Speak about some of the strong influences in your life?

My high school bio teacher, Mr. Henschel, he was important in helping me be interested in science. My high school art teacher helped me, art was something different that I hadn’t really gotten into, so he was really foundational in encouraging me in doing things that I was uncomfortable doing, and in which I hadn’t had prior experience doing. I am definitely a type A person, I gravitate to things that I am good at, so it was really important for me to have a teacher who encouraged me to keep trying at things that I was not immediately good at.

In college I had a couple of amazing professors and mentors at the University of Utah. Tony Butterfield was an incredibly supportive, warm, and giving person, and he provides lots of opportunities for students to talk with him about engineering and dealing with the college experience. Kody Powell, he gave me my first real research experience, he leads a program that does manufacturing energy audits. Working on this expanded my mind on what I could with engineering and where my interests were. He was the first person that I worked on computational research with, and I hadn’t seen many women in this area, so having a mentor who was supportive was foundational for me going on to grad school to do computational research. Kody and Tony were both very helpful when I was putting together my applications and thinking through my choices.

Another person is a really good family friend, Julie Epperson, who was a constant presence in my childhood. She is someone who shows up for her people, and she was always there for me. She taught me how to really listen and be there for people you care about, even if they don’t ask or communicate that they’re struggling.

Tell us a little about your area of research

I am broadly working in electrochemical energy systems. Our lab specifically works on electrolyzers which make chemical products from electrical energy.  Right now, I am working on water electrolysis, which produces hydrogen by splitting water, and CO2 reduction which takes CO2 (ideally captured from the air or industrial process) and converts it to value-added products such as ethylene or formate. The idea is that we could use renewable energy to power these processes and substantially decrease our reliance upon fossil fuels for energy and chemical production.

These devices are complicated though- they have very complex chemical reactions that are affected by the presence of large electric fields, contaminants, multiphase flow, etc. Additionally, these systems need to be very energy and resource efficient. Because of the many length scales involved, it can sometimes be very difficult to experimentally diagnose problems within the system and determine where energy in-efficiencies are coming from. What I do is the computational modeling of the device components, such as the membrane or electrolyte/catalyst interface, to try and better understand the processes occurring during operation, and identify ways to design better devices. 

I work with a lot of experimentalists to better understand these systems. All of my projects are very collaborative, and I typically have an experimental counterpart who I work with to define research questions to investigate together.

I really enjoy this work because it has a lot of potential applications. These strategies can be used for chemical manufacturing, producing renewable energy, carbon capture, etc. 

What would you say to someone considering a similar research career?

I think this depends on what stage they are at. As an undergraduate who is interested in renewable energy and considering grad school, they should try their hardest to get a research experience. It is the best way to decide if this is the kind of thing you would like to do. If it is hard to get that kind of experience, talk to your professors, look up some professional conferences in your area and see what folks are presenting on to understand what people in the field are looking at.

There are also a lot of startups in this area, so poke around at those. There are startups in energy policy, technology, or research, this will give you a good idea of the questions that people are asking and what problems they are looking to solve, and which of these are of interest to you. The Department of Energy’s website is also a good place to look just to get a general idea of research priorities in this area.

A great resource is to reach out to the students who are doing the research – send them an email. Ask about the work, the environment and what their experience is like. I am always happy to talk to someone who is interested in finding out more.

You were recently involved with the organization of the United Nations Right Here Right Now Human Rights Summit that was held in Boulder in late 2022. Tell us a little more about that experience.

My research advisor nominated me to join the Steering Committee. My motivation for doing this kind of research is improving the quality of people’s lives and in particular those that are impacted the most by climate change, so this was something that I was extremely interested in being part of. I took a class during my undergraduate degree that talked about historical chemical catastrophes, and these accidents were almost always located in places that were poor, racially segregated, or had little say in whether they wanted a chemical plant near them. The communities most impacted by climate change are those that are underserved and who contributed much less to the causes of climate change, and I wanted to be part of meeting that addressed these issues head on.

It has always been striking to me how disproportionate the impacts of climate change and the fossil fuel industry are. The communities most impacted by climate change are those that contributed the least to it and are therefore usually less prepared to respond to its impacts. One of the main things that made me excited to be part of this conference is that you can’t separate your research from the people it impacts,, so this was also a wonderful opportunity for me to learn more about the human side of these issues and hear from experts who think about this all day. I think about technology and computer modelling, but I know I can stand to learn the most from people who think about the human impacts of the devices I study. I went to a conference focused on carbon capture technologies last year, and the whole discussion was around “we need to do carbon capture”, but there were a few people who spoke up and said yes, and we need to think about how it is going to impact people and how, as a society we utilize carbon capture.

We need to keep working towards a just energy transition and we need to do everything possible to ensure equitable energy access, as well as carbon capture. These interactions really helped shape my thinking around these issues, especially in hearing from the diverse range of experts that we were able to bring together for the summit.

I firmly believe that you cannot tell people who have electricity to stop using it because it is coming from a fossil fuel source. You need to provide a viable renewable alternative and it needs to be in a way that engages, benefits, and builds communities, helping them to be sustainable and sufficient in a way that they are resilient to natural disaster, climate change, and geopolitical conflicts. 

Tell us a little more about your role in the organization of this summit.

I was one of the student representatives on the Summit Steering Committee. A lot of the work that I was involved in was suggesting panel participants, defining what the panels would be, and going through and vetting participants. The idea was that we needed to make sure that we built a summit around global diversity, providing good representation and making sure that voices were heard. The guidance we received from the United Nations was to think globally, to make sure that we were inviting people from all over the world.

We talked a lot about having a youth component running through the summit, folks under the age of 24, (which is how the UN defines youth). We would make sure that we had a wide range of ages on panels, and we incorporated that perspective into almost all of the panels.

You have talked about collaboration and working as part of a team in both your research and your role in organizing this summit. Could you say a little more about how you see working in a team?

I enjoy teamwork, I love the opportunity to working with my peers and learn from people who are much better at things that I don’t think about as much. In the experimental side of research, I am fascinated talking to experimentalists and understanding better what is physically happening. In my computer I build an ideal model, and everything works the way I tell it to. Experimentalists must be really clever about the way that they are measuring things and setting up their systems which helps me think about things in a new way, and they usually come up with research questions that I wouldn’t have considered on my own. Working in a team, whether it is research or organizing a summit is a great way to learn from others.

I enjoy working in an environment where I can get constructive criticism from others, on things that I don’t know, or things that I could do better. Sometimes in the moment you are like “Oh no, I’m the worst”, but later, it can often be a great opportunity to grow. I think that approaching problems with humility and working with others that you genuinely enjoy working produces much better science.

Sometimes you end up in the weeds with the details of science, and it can feel really hard and really isolated. Having teammates to talk to and just commiserate with can be so valuable and is often something that really energizes me.

All of the people that I work with are so talented that it makes me excited for the future. The passion that they have makes me hopeful because I know amazing, dedicated people are working on these problems.

Speaking of the future, where do you see your research areas leading?

I would hope that in 20 years we will be carbon neutral. Most projections are stating that we need to get there by 2050, but I would hope that it is sooner because 2050 is a hard deadline. I would like to see a much greater focus on biodiversity and ecosystems in engineering and technical solutions. We really need to think a lot about the biological side, and how complex these ecosystems are. What is it we are doing to impact the non-human world and how do we minimize negative impacts? The work I am doing has a direct link into the renewable energy generation and carbon capture pieces of this puzzle, so I am very interested in working with people in policy or natural sciences to get more complete solutions.

Unfortunately, this work is extremely time constrained – we don’t have time to wait. Hence the UN Right Here, Right Now initiative. We must develop, optimize, and deploy these technologies by 2050 on a large scale, and we’re already behind schedule. So at the end of the day, I just want to be involved in developing solutions so that I can say that I tried my hardest to make a better world for future generations.