My interests primarily fall under the categories of tropical cyclones, numerical modeling, and predictability. I am interested in the ability of various ensemble techniques to represent the uncertainty in initial conditions, and how the error and spread in the initial conditions grows with time within the ensemble. I have explored direct modification of the initial conditions using a balanced vorticity perturbation initialized in WRF-ARW to better understand the sensitivity of tropical cyclone track prediction to local synoptic influences, and have also examined thermodynamic and dynamic fields sampled by dropsonde data in order to better understand the physical mechanisms by which tropical cyclogenesis occurs.