Dalia Kirschbaum Career Profile

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My name is Dalia Kirschbaum. I'm a researcher in the hydrology lab at Goddard Space Flight Center. And my focus is landslide modeling.

I grew up in Minnesota. We have flooding, we have drought. There are no landslides, except in the northern areas of Minnesota, and very small ones at that. So looking at earthquakes or hurricanes was such a crazy phenomenon, and I loved the idea that nature was just so powerful, and that we could actually use data from the above the Earth to figure out what's happening on the surface and in the atmosphere.

So I was always very interested in math, and all through school I kind of thought that I was going to be either a math major or do something with math. And then freshman year of college actually I took a very interesting class on different environmental issues. And I found that I was really fascinated with natural disasters, but what I realized is that you can actually apply math and you can apply science to real-world topics, and you can use the information that you get, or the results from your models to really help people and try to mitigate against these hazards. So I decided to go to graduate school with a focus in applying remotely-sense, or satellite, data to evaluate hazards, all different types of natural disasters. And in my dissertation I focused in landslides because I felt that it was a very underrepresented hazard in the grand scheme of natural disaster research. I really am looking in quite global scales, and I'm trying to figure out how landslides are occurring and model the activity, from everything from the local, one hillslope scale to the regional level, like Central America, to then the global scale.

Most of my studies were done in the computer lab or looking at different models, but I did take some very interesting field trips during graduate school and even during undergrad to look at different rock formations, to look at landslide scars, and what you realize is how important it is to really understand the total environment in order to really get a sense of what is causing these hazards.

I think the most important thing is to continue learning and to continue pushing what you think is interesting and find a way to get yourself there.