Research

From molecular spectroscopy to stratospheric ballooning

Research

My research has followed the light — literally. I trained as a molecular spectroscopist, spent a decade doing Raman and infrared spectroscopy of biological tissues, and now work at the intersection of atmospheric science, undergraduate education, and the question of how you do meaningful research at a community college.

Raman Spectroscopy and Blood Glucose

My PhD work at Syracuse University, in Joe Chaiken’s lab, focused on noninvasive blood glucose measurement using near-infrared Raman spectroscopy. The idea was straightforward: shine a laser onto the skin, collect the Raman-scattered light, and extract a glucose concentration without drawing blood. The execution was not straightforward at all. Tissue is a brutal optical medium — it scatters, absorbs, and fluoresces — and the glucose Raman signal is buried under contributions from water, hemoglobin, lipids, and everything else in the beam path.

We developed a tissue-modulation technique that exploited the pulsatile nature of blood flow to isolate the signal from arterial blood against the static tissue background. That work produced a small clinical study, several SPIE proceedings papers, and my dissertation.

Bone Biomechanics

After Syracuse I moved to Mike Morris’s lab at the University of Michigan, where the target shifted from soft tissue to hard: bone. We used Raman microscopy to probe the ultrastructural response of cortical bone to mechanical loading — watching, in real time, how the mineral and collagen phases of bone deform under stress.

That work led to collaborations on spatially offset Raman spectroscopy (SORS) for transcutaneous bone measurement, compositional studies of osteoporotic bone, and a dynamic mechanical testing system purpose-built for the Raman microscope. A 2005 paper in Applied Spectroscopy on subsurface Raman probing, with Pavel Matousek and Tony Parker at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, received the Society for Applied Spectroscopy’s William F. Meggers Award for Outstanding Paper of the Year.

A full list of publications from both research areas is on the Publications page.

Fluorosilicate Hydrolysis

During my postdoc at the University of Michigan, one side project I worked on also collaborated with Larry Beck on a study of hexafluorosilicate hydrolysis — the chemistry behind water fluoridation. While the Raman spectroscopy I had intended to use did not work out for a variety of technical reasons, using ¹⁹F NMR and pH measurements, we showed that the hydrolysis of fluorosilicate species in drinking water was more complex than previously assumed. That work was published in Environmental Science & Technology in 2006.

Research at CWC

Moving to Central Wyoming College in 2010 meant leaving the Raman lab behind, but it didn’t mean leaving research. The question just changed: instead of what can I measure with a spectrometer? it became what meaningful scientific work can undergraduates at a rural community college do?

Wyoming INBRE

Since 2018 I have served as CWC’s Network Institutional Coordinator for Wyoming INBRE, an NIH-funded program that builds a pipeline of community college students with interest in biomedical science for transfer to the University of Wyoming. INBRE supports biomedically oriented coursework, mentored research, laboratory equipment, student stipends, and faculty development at CWC.

My STEM colleagues in Riverton, Lander, and Jackson, Wyoming do the lion’s share of the work with our students - working on several locally-relevent and globally-connected topics.

Details on current and past funding are on the Grants page.

High-Altitude Ballooning

In 2023 an opportunity was presented to participate in the Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project (NEBP), funded by NASA through the National Space Grant Foundation, CWC students designed, built, and launched instrumented payloads to the stratosphere during the 2023 annular and 2024 total solar eclipses. The project engaged nine students across eight flights and produced poster presentations at the University of Wyoming’s Undergraduate Research Day in both 2024 and 2025. Continuation flights looked at cosmic radiation levels during coronal mass ejection events.

That work contributed to a 2026 paper in Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences — a 34-author collaboration documenting what the nationwide network learned about running large-scale undergraduate research across 53 teams and 75 institutions. CWC was one of the community colleges in the project, and our students’ experience is part of what the paper reports on.

The ballooning program continues with support from the Wyoming NASA Space Grant Consortium, with students now developing atmospheric gas sensing payloads for future flights.

Mineral Dust Aerosols

Beginning in 2025, CWC is part of an NSF-funded collaboration with the University of Wyoming on the optical properties of mineral dust aerosols. My role involves mentoring our students through learning to model the optical dust particles on NCAR’s Derecho supercomputer…

Other Opportunities

I am always interested in talking with colleagues from around Wyoming about potential opportunities to collaborate!