Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair. Khalil Gibran
Everything is funny if you can laugh at it.
Krystyna happily goes by many nicknames, but most people that know her well call her Krys or Krysia (rhymes with "Trisha"). Krysia grew up in the Adirondack Park and has very fond memories of her childhood, playing in the forest behind her house, making snow-forts, and riding her horse, Queenie, exploring the area. She enjoyed competing in Eventing during high school. She trained horses, washed dishes, cleaned doctor's offices, and weeded her way through college. She also learned a bit about flipping houses.
Krysia majored in geology for her B.S. at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY, where she minored in Outdoor Studies. She completed a senior thesis on Paleocene gastropods from North Dakota and participated in the Adirondack Semester where she lived in a yurt village on the edge of Lake Massawepie in Tupper Lake for a semester. Her time at SLU resulted in life-long friendships, especially from her time interning at an organic farm, Bittersweet Farm, in Huevelton, NY.
Following her studies at St Lawrence, she went on to Kent State University where she received her Master's in Geology in 2014. Her studies were on the decapods of the Maastrichtian from the Coon Creek Formation in Alabama. Her interests include speciation, biodiversity, paleo-food webs, and taphonomic effects on decapod assemblage studies.
Krysia received her PhD from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2018. She studied the use of microfossils where she specialized in testate amoebae, diatoms, and stable isotope proxies along with other markers to reconstruct anthropogenic impacts in lacustrine settings. As part of The Jefferson Project at RPI, she collaborated with researchers from IBM, Union College, and Brock University on paleolimnological analyses.
She also worked on samples from Cayuga Lake, Lake Junin (Peru), and Lake Superior and Lake Michigan. One of her favorite parts of the collaboration was working with the GSAS department's Eco Resilience Games Group on VR and AR contributions to the project. She served as a science advisor to two games: The Aquatic Messenger and World of Plankton. World of Plankton can be viewed at the ECHO Museum in Burlington, VT. She is most passionate about multi-disciplinary projects, alternative education, and increasing accessibility to the earth sciences.
Krysia has worked as a consulting geologist, primarily in the mining industry. She also conducted small permitting projects for navigational maintenance in lakes. She was recently employed as the school programs manager at miSci - Museum of Innovation and Science in Schenectady. She is currently pursuing other passions including starting her own farm business and writing.
She continues to enjoy hiking, canoeing, and camping and is passionate about permaculture and sustainable, community-oriented practices. She enjoys podcasts, audiobooks, and reading about almost anything but particularly enjoys reading about eastern philosophy, social justice, and regenerative agriculture. Her hobbies include walking with her dog in the woods, cross-country skiing (and skijoring!), horseback riding, gardening, farming, baking pies, writing essays, drawing, painting, and playing ice hockey. She would like to one day play the piano and is currently learning Spanish.