Andrew is currently an assistant research scientist in the Biospheric Sciences Laboratory at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and ESSIC at University of Maryland, working with Ben Poulter. His main goal is to understand how climate variability and extremes influence global plant function, and the consequent water and carbon cycle responses. Drylands are a large focus of his work. At NASA, Andrew is a NASA ECOSTRESS science team member and uses land surface temperature to understand global ecosystem vulnerability. He also co-manages "ARID," which is a scoping study for whether global drylands should be the next NASA Terrestrial Ecology Program field campaign.
Andrew was formerly a NASA Postdoctoral Program fellow at NASA GSFC with Ben Poulter, Joanna Joiner, Randy Koster, and Abhishek Chatterjee. He investigated the effects of rainfall intermittency on the terrestrial biosphere using NASA satellites (SMAP, MODIS, and OCO-2).
In April 2021, Andrew received his Ph.D. from MIT working with Professor Dara Entekhabi. At MIT, he used NASA's Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite retrievals of soil moisture and vegetation optical depth to understand fundamentally how water moves through the soil-plant continuum following rainfall events at large spatial scales. A portion of his work included developing and improving algorithms for retrieving soil and plant water content from microwave satellite brightness temperature observations.
In 2016, Andrew graduated from Drexel University with B.S. and M.S. degrees in Civil Engineering. Working with Professor Franco Montalto, his master's thesis was on integrating green infrastructure into urban parks in NYC for stormwater management. Andrew was also a member of Drexel's Division I golf team.