I am a strong candidate because I approach problems the way researchers do, by sitting with uncertainty long enough to turn it into a question worth answering.
I first encountered environmental issues not as topics to study, but as questions that seemed impossible to ignore. A West African forest on a map looked intact, yet the data suggested it had already lost most of its original cover. That dissonance, between what data shows and what the eye assumes, became the intellectual thread I have followed ever since. It is why I gravitated toward computational methods, satellite imagery, and tipping point theory rather than descriptive ecology. I am less interested in cataloguing what exists than in modelling what is about to change.
I also know what I do not yet have. I have the research question, the theoretical grounding, and the motivation. What I lack is a mentor who can stress-test my reasoning, push back on my methods, and hold the work to a standard I cannot yet set for myself. That is precisely what this program offers – and precisely why I am applying now, before I have everything figured out, rather than after.
The researchers I most admire, including Prof. César Terrer at MIT and Prof. Simon Levin at Princeton, did not start with complete technical mastery. They started with a question they could not leave alone. I have that. I am here to build the rest.