Hal earned a BSE in Environmental Engineering and a BS in Applied Mathematics from Northern Arizona University in 2001 before earning a MS in Statistics with Distinction from Northern Arizona University in 2004. He worked in the Division of Atmospheric Sciences (DAS) at the Desert Research Institute (DRI) in Reno, Nevada as an Air Quality Data Analyst performing statistical analysis and developing models on multiple projects under contract with local, national, and international government agencies.
Hal worked in the Division of Hydrologic Sciences (DHS) at the Desert Research Institute as a Graduate Research Assistant while working towards his doctoral degree, earning a PhD in Hydrology from the University of Nevada, Reno in 2013. During his tenure at the DHS, Hal worked on a variety of projects in areas of groundwater contaminant transport, snowpack hydrology, ecohydrology, groundwater thermal convection, and sediment transport. Hal was a statistical consultant on several projects assisting DRI colleagues with modelling, sampling and experimental designs.
Hal received a postdoctoral position in the School of Geography and Environmental Science at the ÃÛÌÒTV in 2014, where he worked in collaboration with the μ-VIS X-Ray Imaging Centre to develop a 3D vector-based sediment entrainment model from X-ray scanned images of extracted samples of river sediment beds. Hal’s work on rice agriculture sustainability by led to developing a spatially-explicit system dynamics model (SDM) of the Vietnamese Mekong Delta upon which subsequent components were added to the SDM to study the effects of hydrologic extremes of floods and droughts throughout the Mekong River Basin. This model was developed with contributions from Vietnamese stakeholder and policy makers. Hal currently works with the WorldPop modelling group to develop Bayesian statistical models for human mobility and population estimates.
