Hi 👋, my name is Rich.

I’ve spent the past 12 years as an educator, researcher, data scientist, and project/product manager. Currently, I scope and manage the delivery of data science and software projects/products at Accenture. In addition, I co-founded the Water Data Lab, helped create R for Water Resources Data Science, and occasionally write.

Through my consulting practice – a blend of water resources, data science, and technology – I’ve developed models that predict where wells will go dry during drought and web applications to communicate findings, automated reports of California municipal water quality, and the nation’s largest publicly-accessible spatial database of water system spatial boundaries.

I grew up off-the-grid in the high desert hills and boulder fields of Southern California and moved to Berkeley for college where I studied Biology and Conflict Resolution. Then, I spent 3 unforgettable years in educational nonprofits in Yosemite, the Marin Headlands, and the Santa Cruz mountains. During summers, I led trips in Thailand for National Geographic. For the next 5 years during my PhD, I built 3D, physics-based and statistical models of subsurface groundwater flow and contaminant transport, supported by the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Energy, NASA, and Microsoft. I then helped develop groundwater sustainability plans in California, which entailed coordination of diverse stakeholder groups, technical project management, IoT monitoring, and mathematical modeling. Now, I consult for energy and water utilities, startups, and environmental nonprofits at the intersection of resource management, data governance, and technology.

My home base is in Oakland, California. I love to surf, ski, climb mountains, read and learn new things, play guitar, and cook.

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.