I completed my undergraduate thesis under Dr. Johnny Waters, a invertebrate paleontologist, and Dr. Sarah Carmichael, a geochemist and petrologist in the Geology Department at Appalachian State University.

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My obsession with fine-grained rocks and the stories that they tell started very early in my geology career. A project that began with an incredible field trip to analyze Late Devonian deposits in south central Russia (summarized here by AppState Mag) evolved into a study of the extent of the LDME in shale deposits from this region (generally the Central Asian Orogenic Belt). The resulting thesis was an analysis of the geochemistry and sedimentology of a succession of Late Devonian rocks that spanned the Frasnian-Fammenian boundary, and thus recorded several ocean anoxic events in what we hypothesized was an island-arc setting in the open Thethys ocean. This work was presented at a variety of conferences, was published in P-cubed in 2014, and is ongoing at Appalachian State within the Dagger Research Group.

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