I am currently Assistant Professor of History at the California Institute of Technology. In 2025 I completed a Landaus Fellowship at the
Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society and in 2022 served as the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Fellow at the
Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Prior to Caltech I was a Haas Postdoctoral Fellow at the
Science History Institute, a researcher-in-residence with the
Land Art Agency, a program coordinator and postdoctoral fellow in residence at the
Consortium for
the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, and the 2018-2019
AHA Fellow in Aerospace History.
From 2016 to 2018 I was an A. W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the
Institute for Research in
the Humanities at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison. At UW, I held joint appointments
at the
Department of History and the
Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies,
and I remain affiliated with the
Center for Culture, History, and Environment. I earned a bachelors degree in English and astronomy from
Barnard College, and a PhD from the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. My research has been
supported by fellowships and funds from NASA, the Society for the History of Technology, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, the Perry World House, the Penn Humanities Forum, and the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine. I am a Research Associate in the Department
of Space History at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
I spend what time remains writing stage plays, container gardening, playing mandolin (poorly), and serving as an
urban astronomy and
Girls Rock Camp educator.