I worked at the Permafrost Archives Science Laboratory (PACS Lab, University of Alberta) for nearly three years as an undergraduate student under the supervision of Dr. Duane Froese. As an undergraduate research assistant, I performed diverse analyses on permafrost materials from Yukon Territory and the Northwest Territories, including producing a paleoecological reconstruction of a Pleistocene-Holocene transitional site in the Klondike region for my bachelor’s thesis. I have also developed techniques for the segmentation of computed tomography (CT) scanning data of permafrost materials, focusing on quantifying excess ice volume, which included an internship with the Alfred Wegener Institute in Potsdam, Germany. These experiences gave me a strong background in permafrost/Quaternary sciences, and an interest in quantitative modelling. I am now taking on an MSc thesis with Dr. Froese with the intention of producing and optimizing a ground ice content model for the Mackenzie Valley Highway Corridor, which is the proposed right-of-way for the construction of an all-season highway between Wrigley and Norman Wells, NWT. This project aims to constrain ice contents at a high resolution along the corridor, informing geohazard assessments, as well as to push forward multi-variate ground ice modelling techniques in the greater Sahtu region using this data-rich corridor as a testbed.
