Research Staff, Virginia Tech
Biography
Supervising Faculty: Jitendra Kumar
In May of 2013, Zach graduated from The Pennsylvania State University with a M.Sc. degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering having a focus on environmental remote sensing. His research studied soil moisture dynamics in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica using high-resolution satellite images. The resulting datasets provided information for the McMurdo Dry Valleys Long-Term Ecological Research Program, an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary study of the aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems in an ice-free region of Antarctica. Currently, Zach is working on sampling network representativeness and data scaling using high-resolution satellite imagery for the Next Generation Ecosystem Experiment (NGEE) Arctic. NGEE Arctic seeks to improve process understanding and model representation of important ecosystem-climate feedbacks in the Arctic. Zach is applying multivariate data mining methodologies for landscape characterization, yielding useful metrics for indicating the representativeness of sites, measurements, and model parameters.
Education
PhD in Energy Science and Engineering - University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Master of Science in Civil and Environmental Engineering - The Pennsylvania State University
Bachelor of Science in Earth System Science - University of Alabama, Huntsville