People

Anastasia is an Assistant Professor at Penn State University. She is interested in fluvial and coastal morphodynamics, as well as feedbacks between climate, vegetation, and surface processes. She spends most of her time working on Arctic landscapes, using combinations of remote sensing, numerical modeling, experiments, and field work to understand how landscapes and process interactions evolve over time. Outside of work, Anastasia is an avid baker, musical theatre enthusiast, and tennis player.

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Doni Anderson, MS student

Doni returned to the CoLD group in Fall 2025 as a new MS student after previously working with us in an REU in 2023. Her research focuses on understanding the stratigraphy of ice-covered deltas with a goal of using this knowledge to better interpret Martian systems.

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Sabrina Ashik, PhD student

Sabrina earned her bachelor’s degree in Engineering Physics from the University of British Columbia in May 2025, specializing in Earth and Ocean Science. As an undergraduate, she worked on a wide range of geoscience problems, from studying sediment transport in oil sand pit lakes to developing geophysical inversion algorithms for UXO detection. She joined the CoLD group in Fall 2025 as a Ph.D. student, where her research focuses on modeling sediment transport in global deltas using SWOT satellite data.

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Ash Keenan, PhD student

Ash joined the CoLD group in Fall 2024 as a new PhD student. Her research currently focuses on experimental approaches in delta dynamics and internal variability in delta morphodynamics.

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Sinead Lyster is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Geosciences. She received her PhD from Imperial College London in 2022. Her background is in the morphodynamics of ancient fluvial systems. Sinead worked to setup our new experimental delta facility and conducted the first delta experiments! She is now working on remote sensing of sediment laden sea ice.

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Drew Moreland, MS student

Drew joined the CoLD group in Fall 2025 as a new MS student. He is originally from Philadelphia, PA. He did his undergrad at Lincoln University, an HBCU outside of Philadelphia, and studied environmental engineering. At Penn State, Drew will be studying river avulsions and hopes to be able to predict the frequency of avulsion occurrences.

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Nynaeve Phillipson, PhD student

Nynaeve earned her bachelor’s degree in geology from the University of Houston in December 2024. As an undergraduate research assistant in Brandee Carlson’s Morphodynamics Lab, she conducted independent research correlating multispectral satellite reflectance with field-based suspended sediment concentration (SSC) measurements on the Lower Brazos River in southeast Texas. After graduating, she joined the University of Houston research staff on a Texas Water Development Board project validating hyperspectral imaging for estimating SSC among various water quality parameters in Texas estuaries. In Spring 2025, she joined the team and began using her remote sensing expertise to analyze river discharge and sediment transport seasonality, focusing on ungauged river reaches with data from NASA’s SWOT satellite.

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Tyler Roudabush, BS student

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Tyler joined the CoLD group in August 2025 as a senior thesis student. He is pursuing his BS in Geosciences. His research will focus on topographic change in river delta experiments.

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Eva SinhaRoy, BS student

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Eva joined the CoLD group in January 2025 through the WISER program. She is pursuing her BS in Geobiology. Her research focuses on feedbacks between vegetation and delta dynamics.

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Liz received her bachelors in Earth Science from Penn State in May 2024, with a minor in Geography. She joined the team in Fall 2023 to examine coastal sea ice melt at Alaska river mouths using remote sensing and GIS. She is continuing and expanding this research for her Masters degree to investigate seasonal dynamics of ice and sediment at Arctic river mouths. Outside of the research group, Liz is actively involved in campus sustainability efforts. 

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Xiwei worked with us as a Postdoctoral Researcher from January 2024 to July 2025, focusing on seasonal turbidity patterns in the Noatak River, Alaska and turbidity patterns at confluences of the Susquehanna River, PA. He is now an Assistant Professor at Trinity University.

Zane received his Bachelors in Earth Science and Policy in May 2024. He continued to work with us through the summer and into the fall, helping Sinead setup the lab and get her experiments running, as well as analyzing data for delta topography. He went on to pursue his Masters in Bucharest.

Claire Hines

Claire Hines received her MS in Geosciences in May 2024. Her research was on modeling suspended sediment transport through Arctic river deltas to estimate how much sediment deltas may trap and what effect that has on coastal turbidity in the Arctic. She now works in environmental consulting at AECOM.

Aubree High

Aubree received her Bachelors in Earth Science with a GIS minor in May 2024. She joined our team in July 2023 to do research on coastal erosion on Pennsylvania’s Lake Erie shoreline. She went on to intern at GeoMarvel.

Emily is a Meteorology major at Penn State. She joined our team through the WISER/MURE/FURP program to do research on coastal sea ice melt at Arctic river mouths using remote sensing and GIS.

Jiahao received his Bachelors in Earth Science at Penn State in May 2023. He worked to analyze and compare the morphologies of Arctic and temperate deltas in remotely sensed imagery. He went on to pursue a Masters in Computer Information and Technology at UPenn.

Jackie is a current Meteorology major at Penn State. She joined our team through the WISER/MURE/FURP program to do research on coastal sea ice melt at Arctic river mouths using remote sensing and GIS.

Selma received her Bachelors in Wildlife and Fisheries at Penn State. Selma first started working with us through a Research Experience for Undergraduates and then continued her research on Arctic deltas. Selma worked to quantify fluxes of soil organic carbon due to bank erosion on major Arctic deltas.

Rachel was a post-Masters researcher at LANL who received her MS in Statistics from Montana State University. She worked on our CSES project to examine seasonal variability in surface hydrologic connectivity on river deltas and its effects on water residence times.

Paige was an MS student in Civil Engineering at the University of New Mexico. She joined LANL through the Minority Serving Institutions Partnership Program and collaborated on the HiLAT-RASM project to compare Arctic and temperate delta morphologies. The goal was to determine if Arctic deltas are different from non-Arctic deltas and if so, why?

Jay was a PhD student at UT Austin in Civil and Environmental Engineering. Through the NSF INTERN program, Jay worked to improve our understanding of flux distributions through delta channel networks by comparing typical width-weighted flux partitioning schemes with model fluxes from DeltaRCM. Read more at Jay’s personal website.

Mulu was a post-Masters researcher at LANL from 2018-2020. During his last year, he worked to analyze the spatial distribution of thermokarst lakes in Alaska, differences in lake morphologies, and effects of lake bathymetry on talik development.

Tabatha joined us via the SULI program in summer 2020. She collaborated on the InteRFACE project to help develop coastal terrestrial typologies on Alaska’s North Slope. Tabatha was an undergraduate at Vassar College.

Ryan worked with us via the SULI program in summer 2020. He worked on the HiLAT-RASM project to develop techniques to observe river mouth ice melting patterns in synthetic aperture radar. Ryan was a graduate student at Yonsei University.

Deon worked with us via the NSF INTERN program in 2019 to model nitrate loss in the Mackenzie Delta channel network. Deon received his PhD from Ohio State in 2020 and is now an Assistant Professor at Vassar College.

Rebecca worked with us for the summers of 2017 and 2018 to model the effects of ice cover and permafrost on delta morphodynamics using DeltaRCM. Rebecca received her PhD from Duke University in 2018.