Opportunities
Are you currently a UMW undergraduate majoring in one of our EESC majors? Are you curious about the climate and ocean? Do you want a hands-on learning experience that will give you a bump in either job or graduate school applications? If so, please contact me! I am always looking for students to either support my current research or tackle their own independent research questions under my mentorship. See below for examples of current research projects in my lab.
See expectations for research students in my lab.
Tropical Pacific Climate Variability
The tropical Pacific has a profound influence on global temperature and rainfall patterns, yet our understanding of natural climate variability in this region of the world is limited due to the scarcity of instrumental observations. I use the geochemistry of fossil corals to develop records of past climate and oceanic change, which can be used to investigate and characterize long-term natural climate variability in the tropics.
Relevant publications
Coral Oxygen Isotopic Records Capture the 2015/2016 El Niño Event in the Central Equatorial Pacific
Enhanced El Niño‐Southern Oscillation variability in recent decades
El Niño–Southern Oscillation complexity
A comparison of U/Th and rapid‐screen 14C dates from Line Island fossil corals
Climatic and biotic thresholds of coral-reef shutdown
Student Mentored Projects
Chesapeake Bay Climate Reconstruction
Rainfall patterns in the Chesapeake Bay region are expected to become more intense, leading to increased runoff and pollution as well as causing large swings in salinity in the Bay. I am interested in developing proxies from the Chesapeake Bay, such as the geochemistry from oyster shells, to reconstruct past changes in rainfall variability. My goal is to be able to quantify how changes in present-day rainfall is contributed by natural climate variability and anthropogenic climate change.
Student Mentored Projects
Water Isotopes
Stable isotopes of oxygen and hydrogen, δ18O and δD, are tracers of climatic changes within the hydrologic cycle, and thus are a potential link in the relationship between climate-influenced changes to the hydrologic cycle and modern and paleoenvironments. I am interested in assessing the changes in the local hydrologic cycle under continued greenhouse gas forcing, or climate change. The goal is to develop a long-term record of water isotopes from both rainwater and stream water from this region that can be used to track climate-related changes in the hydrologic cycle in the Chesapeake Bay region.
Student Mentored Projects
Additional Student Investigations
I frequently work with students on projects primarily driven by their own research interests. Here are a few examples of other projects students have completed under my mentorship.
Student Mentored Projects
Estimated 2020 CO2 Emission Reductions in Virginia’s Transportation Sector from COVID-19
Past Research
Propagation history of the Osaka-wan blind thrust, Japan, from trishear modeling