Dakotah graduated from the University of Cincinnati at the end of Fall 2019 with a dual Bachelor of Science degree in Astrophysics and Physics. He spent his undergraduate years working with Mike Sitko researching accretion disks around Herbig Ae and T Tauri stars. His main project during this period was analyzing correlations between the emission strengths of  Hydrogen lines to calibrate mass accretion rates for observations lacking specific wavelength information. He is currently working on a first author paper for the calibration process. He was also a member of a research group based at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics where he is analyzing publicly available data on the Sun to better account for stellar activity contributions to exoplanet observations.

Dakotah is current a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles where he works with Dr. Erik Petigura to shed light on the origins and evolution of exoplanetary systems by studying exoplanet atmospheres. He is specifically interested in characterizing the variability of the solar Helium I 1083 nm line to better understand how this stellar chromospheric feature varies in time in an effort to detangle the signal from that of the same Helium line present in the upper atmosphere of Hot Jupiters undergone atmospheric escape.