Overview of Recent Major Projects

While I participate on multiple teams as a leader, subject matter expert, and collaborator, I have included highlights of some recent and favorite projects with openly-available products to demonstrate my impact and expertise.

Dynamic Networks Experiments

Multi-laboratory virtual experiments to quantify impact of new R&D products and architectures on the event monitoring pipeline.

My Role: Experiment & Execution Lead for multi-organizational teams
of over 20 scientists and engineers.

DNE2

Over 20 scientists and engineers collaborated to execute event processing pipelines and demonstrate 2x improvement with next-generation R&D products.

Timeline Overview
10/01/2022-9/30/2024: Design, prepare, execute & deliver

Highlights, Deliverables, and Artifacts
> Papers: 15, Reports: 5+, Presentations: 20
> Established project management & systems engineering procedures, documents, and reviews to support successful, multi-organization, collaborative virtual experiments
> Engagement with stakeholders (federal agencies, national labs, and academic institutions) of innovative solutions that support resilience goals
> Computational architecture developed to orchestrate containerized algorithms across the pipeline & support virtual testbed development
> Systems reliability theory to quantify pipeline performance
> Augmentation theory & application for statistical significance

DNE3

Scientists and engineers are in development of a new experiment to drive the monitoring mission forward. Stay tuned!

Years (estimate): FY25-FY27

Subsurface Facility Imaging

Investigate seismic data’s ability to detect and image subsurface mining facilities and activities.

My Role: Co-Principal Investigator in collaboration between Sandia and Oak Ridge National Laboratories

My Responsibilities:

  • Lead the development and application of novel methods to extract and analyze ambient noise signals to advance geophysical imaging techniques.

  • Manage project execution, overseeing a postdoctoral researcher and coordinating with fieldwork staff to ensure timely and effective data collection, analysis, presentation and publishing.

  • Facilitate collaboration with cross-institutional teams and stakeholders, including quarterly reviews and documentation, independent assessments, and more. I maintain alignment of project goals with broader scientific objectives and stakeholder needs.

  • Organized and oversaw fieldwork involving the deployment of over 100 seismic nodes across two deployment series following NEPA standards and mining protocols while ensuring data quality and efficient operations.

Highlights, Deliverables, and Artifacts
> Developed and demonstrated new techniques to detect, locate, and characterize anthropogenic activities at facility scales.
> Multiple reports & papers (in review)
Previously released 2024 report: https://doi.org/10.2172/2430362
> Multiple presentations for broad (4 at American Geophysical Fall Meeting in 2024) & stakeholder engagements
> Two deployments to collect seismic data in collaboration with the mine site.
Data Products

Solar Systems Workings - Convective Vortices

  • Designed a novel detection method and collaborated with NASA JPL to analyze multi-year datasets from the Nevada Mojave Desert, revealing the frequency and characteristics of dust devils.

  • Supervised and mentored undergraduate researchers, resulting in multiple conference presentations and coauthored publications that expanded on their contributions.

  • Successfully organized and presented the project’s outcomes to an independent review panel, demonstrating its impact and aligning with funding authority objectives.

  • Directed data management and release efforts, ensuring compliance with program protocols and enabling the public release of datasets to benefit the wider research community.

Led the development and execution to identify and characterize dust devils using infrasound sensors, advancing research on atmospheric phenomena.

My Role: Project Lead for team of 5 staff scientists and 2 interns across NASA JPL and Sandia National Labs

Highlights, Deliverables, and Artifacts
> Seven years of dust devil recordings on infrasound sensors in the Mojave Desert are openly released. With tens of thousands of records, this is likely the most complete dataset ever released – on Earth or Mars!
See the full dataset here!
> Multiple reports & papers
Paper highlight: Berg et al., 2024: https://doi.org/10.1175/JTECH-D-23-0037.1
> Multiple presentations for broad & stakeholder engagements.; highlights:
Sparks et al. American Geophysical Union Presentation 2022
Urtecho et al. Acoustical Society of America Presentation 2022
News Release: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/972966

> Previously released data products also available.