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Greetings! Well, it's high time for an update to these pages since the last one was in November 1997!

I entered the Ph.D. program in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in September 1995.  Previous to that, I was an undergraduate at Tufts University in Medford, MA where I earned my bachelors degree in Geological Sciences and Classical Archaeology.  The undergraduate programs in geology and archaeology at Tufts are superb! I had the opportunity to do a senior thesis in geology under Jack Ridge.  The long title of that project was "Correlation of deglacial events in the Champlain Lowlands with the western St. Lawrence and Ontario Lowlands facilitated by paleomagnetic analysis of varved lake deposits". Some day when I get a chance, I'll put up a summary of the project.

The promise of interfacing geology and archaeology sent me to the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Minnesota Duluth in the fall of 1993 to work on a masters degree with George (Rip) Rapp, Jr. Rip arranged for me to work on an aspect of the Nikopolis Project, a multidiscliplinary archaeological survey of southern Epirus (Greece) directed by James Wiseman of the Boston University Department of Archaeology.  My study dealt with the middle and late Holocene geomorphic evolution and paleogeography of the lower Acheron River Valley in Epirus which I reconstructed using basic principles of sedimentology/stratigraphy in conjuction with ostracods and forams as salinity indicators. The project turned out to be a wonderful synthesis between geology and archaeology, and was well worth braving two years of cold Duluth winters!  Brrrrrrr..... For those interested, a link to details about that project and an electronic copy of the full thesis as an Adobe Acrobat PDF file can be found on the Other Research page.

At UMass, I am working on a project to develop a record of hurricane and other large storm activity in Massachusetts and southern New England over the last 1,200 years.  This is based primarily on the annually-laminated (e.g. varved) sediments of the Lower Mystic Lake (Medford/Arlington, Massachusetts), but also on sediment cores from Belle Isle Marsh in Boston Harbor. More information about this can be found on my Ph.D. Research page.

I am also involved in some geoarcheological work in Turkey, Greece, and Syria. Links to info about those projects can be found on the Other Research page.

My professional interests are focused in Quaternary studies. In particular, they are related to the interpretation and reconstruction of late Glacial and Holocene paleoenvironments and paleoclimatology based on sedimentary records.  Particular interests include coastal geomorphic/landscape evolution and climate variability especially related to archaeology. I have a lot of self-taught experience with recent fresh to marginal marine ostracods and forams, and for my Ph.D. research am extending that experience to include diatoms.