What have you been up to since graduating from Bowdoin?
I'm originally from Nashville, which is very landlocked, but I needed to look at the ocean to understand climate variability. At Bowdoin, I really grabbed onto the question of how I could do research and how I could build a career around this whole concept of climate change ocean and biogeochemistry. I found out that coral reefs, which act as these plant-animal-rock hybrids that reflect climate change and house 25 percent of the planet's entire marine biodiversity, was a great lens for me to bring all my interests together. I ended up doing an independent study and my senior honors thesis with Professor Michèle LaVigne, whose primary focus was on paleoceanography, or the study of ancient oceans and climates. Both projects focused on me doing my own study of coral reefs from the Florida coast to try to reconstruct the ways that flooding has changed or not changed over the last few decades. It was really exciting, and I got to get a taste for what it's like to do exactly what Professor LaVigne did for her research.
As I was doing these projects, I figured out that I really wanted to keep doing this kind of stuff—both in graduate school, and for a career. When it was time for me to apply to graduate school, I leaned heavily on Professor LaVigne and her connections. She got me in contact with one of her former collaborators who had just started up a lab of his own at the University of Washington in Seattle. His research was about how calcium carbonate is built in seawater. I thought that it sounded really cool, and so I applied to the University of Washington PhD program in oceanography and started in the fall after I graduated.
During my PhD program, I worked on a lot of coral stuff—specificially how our coral reefs can reflect the changes in climate, and what chemical clues we can use and track in the ocean around coral reefs that give us nuanced information about which spots in the ocean are thriving, and which are not. With these clues, we can construct a modern timescale that gives us leading indicators of how and when reefs are becoming degraded—and how we can stop that degradation before it gets too far along that line.
After I finished my PhD, I was really interested taking the same tools and the same sort of forensic approach to biogeochemistry, and applying it to the environment. Since I worked on so much of the modern timescale, I thought that, for my postdoc, I'd want to return to getting an idea of how this stuff applies back to the ancient side of things. I ended up finding a really cool position to do a couple of years' worth of research on a topic of my choosing, at Vanderbilt University back in Nashville. It was a really cool opportunity for me ro move back at my hometown. so it's a really cool opportunity for me to move back to my hometown. In that process of coming home, I discovered that cities can change, too. My research focus at Vanderbilt was an opportunity for me to bring together my knowledge and passion for studying coral, and to apply it to something complementary: studying caves. Along with earning my PhD and conducting this research, I am also an assistant professor at Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.
Why earth and oceanographic science?
The "why," for me, is constantly evolving.
I came into Bowdoin knowing that I wanted to do something environmental. Growing up, I really liked spending time outdoors and by water in particular. My science of choice in high school was chemistry—I really enjoyed that you could use it to break down everything in the world into basic elemental building blocks, and see how those building blocks interact with each other, how they transfer into one another, and how they transform into one another. We're also able to use chemistry as clues of past "environmental crimes." I didn't have a word or a series of words to figure out what it was that I wanted to study, but I just knew that I liked those things about chemistry and being outside, and that if I could find the career that let me put those two together, that'd be really cool. At Bowdoin, I discovered that earth and oceanographic science was something that aligned with an interdisciplinary world view of how a lot of the geosciences actually work.
In Nashville, I noticed that the city didn't feel like they were armed to respond to climate change with any kind of tools that would prevent this from happening—let alone prevent it from happening to the same kinds of people all the time. I really liked the concept of using chemistry and the geosciences to generate really cool climate information on multiple time scales, but then I also am working on giving that information to populations that can do something with it to prepare them to be more resilient and adapt to those changes Collecting and interpreting data is pretty cool, but then you've got to apply that data to make a difference. I think that's something that geoscience is uniquely armed to do because it draws on math, chemistry, biology, physics—all of these things that people study independently—but it also hits on social science.
Climate change needs to be thought of as a public health crisis. It needs to be thought of as something that disproportionately impacts, disadvantaged peoples around the world. There's a huge disconnect between who has the power and the resources to have their voices heard and get to the top of the pack, and the people who are actually being impacted. I want to use my research to bridge those two worlds together. I'm really thankful that I majored in earth and oceanographic science because it's something I've always been interested in—both in terms of the science, and also communicating the science. As I keep going forward, I'm learning more about how to reach a lot of different kinds of people and bring more people into the fold. A lot of people who look like me have been left out of these kinds of conversations, and I'm trying to use my research as a platform to let them know that they belong here, and that their voice, input, and perspective are incredibly valuable.