Project Portfolio

In March 2023, timed with my talk at SxSW, I founded and launched Designing Energy, a collaboration platform that catalogues how innovative people, ideas and technologies are delivering more benefits from clean energy investments. It builds from a PNNL collaboration with academic and research landscape architects, called Renewable Energy Landscapes, where we tried to lay out pathways and landscape characteristics for integrating public values upfront into energy project design and imagined futures. There are many ideas out there -- we wanted to put it under one roof and get people together.

Bioimimicry explores the symbiotic or mimetic connections between biological intelligence — how nature has developed strategies, functions, and technologies — and human corollaries. I have a conviction that deep technology futures will not only be more sustainable but have biological elements at their core, and I am interested in how a better economic philosophy can help create that future.

Before I went on leave from PNNL, I built a cooperation between landscape architecture and renewable energy innovation to envision place-based infrastructure at scale. We published a fantastic white paper in July 2022 on six pathways forward, an active view on how to handle the challenges ahead.

There is good work underway, now by my excellent colleagues, to influence energy technology, planning and investment to shine a light and rectify under-service to less powerful communities. This is not merely mitigation; this means changing the structure and influencing investment into the future electric grid. One pathway is to think about energy storage, which is a proxy for adding flexibility or intelligence into any spot in the grid. How can we design and build energy storage to solve local energy challenges first? There are many ways, in fact. Let me prove it.

My friends Douglas and Drew co-founded and have let fly a fantastic free service that allows people to write, queue, and send gratitude notes to those we appreciate. I wrote my MBA capstone on their joyful sidebar enterprise, and I hope to help increase awareness from CR, where we say gratitudes, agradecimientos.

I chair an IEEE Water Power Systems Task Force that is currently writing a research plan for water-power systems integration research.

Languages are thrilling. I have been trained to some degree in Français, Italiano, kiSwahili, Deutsch, and isiXhosa (a language with click sounds, one of the eleven national South African languages). Why so many? Chissá? Really understanding and speaking languages is a such a different thing than studying them. Now I am learning Spanish at top speed and it feels very different. Yo quiero ser una filóloga.

I serve on the Advisory Board of this incredible organization, which works in the enterpreneurial challenge space of next generation energy technologies, innovative business models, underserved communities, climate change and watershed restoration. The merged mission and top-notch leadership team have built a unique organization over several decades, and I am thrilled to be in the front seat to see where it goes next.

Thanks to the US Energy Association, I am a mentor in a program called FLIE, or Female Leaders in Energy. This program connects early career women in the energy sector from Southeast Asia to women more advanced in their energy careers. Both of my mentees are a class above in vision and ambition, and they inspire me. (Graphic from my simple clip art skills.)

In 2020, my girlfriend Kim and I planned to go to the French Riviera for a month in October and write a children’s book. Instead we endured a worldwide pandemic and wrote scraps of a different story over two years. In summer 2022, we published ZZ’s Little Adventure.

Did you know that among symphonic instruments the cello’s register is the closest to the human voice? This explains its allure, maybe. Cellists are also famous for being ornery. For years in Portland I was a member of a string quartet with much more talented musicians. We called it the Vitula Quartet.

We live in Monteverde Costa Rica because we want our daughter to attend a beloved community bilingual school called Cloud Forest School, in English, and Creativa for short in Spanish. The school is open air with a muy bonito campus, and their online presence is relaunched with pride. Investment in the school and in this kind of education is an important part of being here, choosing here.

In every place I have ever lived, there has been a way for people to self-organize and motivate their friends and neighbors to give food to pantries. In Portland, I was inspired by the Portland Food Project and organized a group of neighbors for bimonthly deliveries of stable pantry goods. These are extraordinary volunteers and organizations. And we are still on the front page of the website!

I am from the beautiful and complicated state of Kentucky, so yes, I do have opinions about bourbon, bluegrass, college basketball, and horse racing. I attended Governors Scholars for Kentucky teenagers around the state, with both the current governor of Kentucky (yes) as well as the friend who inspired me to name this space Oceanic Rebel. I served an AmeriCorps VISTA and Save the Children position teaching early literacy in Frakes, Kentucky, at Henderson Settlement, a Methodist mission up a holler from the Cumberland Gap. This experience is formative, and as I think about how to integrate my homestate into this space, I will share Appalshop in Whitesburg, KY, and their guidance on eastern KY flood relief.

For years I worked for a non-profit river conservation organization on hydropower dam reoperation and when it makes sense, removal. I am so proud of that time, and it cultivated a deep love of the dynamism of rivers, their complexity, how much we rely on them, how they teach us spiritually, offer joy and respite. We used to take groups of friends and kids down multi-day river trips in Oregon. Once I wrote an article for AW on a wild trip on the Bruneau in Idaho. Nothing is quite so janky and open and yet you always go downstream. New bright green oar rig arrives this fall. And I still dream of rivers.

I like to say that I trust people who drink coffee, cuss, and like baseball. But for twenty years I played the cultural opposite of baseball: ultimate frisbee, both women’s and co-ed club. It has given me some of my greatest friends and closest community, who will always stick around the fields. The game has its own truths, which are useful life rules for many situations. Don’t suck and sub. Conservation of greatness. Hammer or you’re nothing.

In Northeast Portland, Oregon, USA, there are 30+ city blocks of trees that are actively management by the neighborhood and the city as a linear arboretum. Leveraging the genius and investment of Jim Gersbach, my neighbor and a tree expert, I built a website during the pandemic to help others understand and explore this magnificent local free resource, and connect with their urban forest. I completed the spring 2022 Neighborhood Tree Stewards course with the City of Portland. I am a junior tree pruner (as captured in the essays section) and enthusiastic member of the Concordia Tree Team.