Hi 👋, my name is Rich.

My expertise is at intersection of hydrogeology, geospatial programming, data science/engineering, climate change, and environmental policy. I’ve built 3D computational fluid dynamics models to explain and predict patterns of groundwater flow and contaminant transport in heterogeneous, alluvial aquifer-aquitard complexes – thin layers of subsurface, freshwater-bearing sediment that support food supply and civilization, and which are in decline worldwide. I’ve developed models that predict where wells will go dry during drought and decision-support tools for natural resources management. I’ve automated California municipal water quality reports, helped build the nation’s largest publicly-accessible spatial database of water system spatial boundaries (now in use by the US EPA) and co-founded the Water Data Lab, a group within Convolve Collective. I also co-developed R for Water Resources Data Science and I occasionally write (informally) about data.

My work has appeared in Nature, the Los Angeles Times, NewScientist, and Newsweek.

Currently, I lead data and software teams in the energy sector. We build tools to help utilities adapt to climate change, assess wildfire risk, and make equitable electrification investments. I still enjoy contributing to the academic literature and to open source projects from time to time. Long ago, I taught environmental science to 5th graders and led National Geographic expeditions for high school students. I hope that one day I can return to teaching.

This website is built with blogdown and Hugo, and deployed using Netlify. My blog posts are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Thanks for being here.