Sam attended Amherst College, where he completed a Bachelor of Arts in Geology and was a three-year starter on the Amherst College football team in the program’s winningest class in its over 130-year history. He completed independent research through the KECK Geology Consortium on the geochemistry of two adjacent volcanic lakes in the Newberry Caldera in Newberry, OR. As a graduate student, Sam works with Christa Kelleher in the Department of Earth Sciences. His research focuses on finding the relationships between stream size, urbanization, and stream temperature through data modeling.