Research

I am a carbonate sedimentologist and Earth historian who approaches the sedimentary record from a quantitative perspective. My research seeks to use the physical and chemical properties of ancience carbonates to infer information about the climates and environments of the deep past. I have always been fascinated by the Neoproterozoic Era (1000-540 million years ago), a pivotal time in the history of our planet characterized by global "snowball Earth" glaciations, large amplitude carbon isotope excursions, and the evolution of animal life, and much of my research centers on developing a better, quantitative record of climate during this Era. My PhD work (MIT, 2022) culminated in a thesis titled "Dolomite as a Paleoenvironmental Archive," in which I explored the puzzling mineral/rock dolomite (CaMg(CO₃)₂) at a range of spatial (nanometer to continent) and temporal (~10² to 10⁹ years) scales using clumped isotope geochemistry, synchrotron crystal mapping, and computational tools.

During my three years (2022-2025) as a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow and Future Faculty in the Physical Sciences Fellow at Princeton University, I worked in the GIRI lab imaging and classifying facies of the Trezona Formation to disentangle facies' influence on carbon isotope geochemistry, began work on both modern and ancient Mg-carbonates, and extended a clumped isotope project from my graduate thesis to incorporate multispectral image analysis.

I am now an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities and St. Anthony Falls Laboratory, where I am setting up a shared clumped isotope geochemistry lab and a 3D grinding and imaging instrument. I aim to extend my research program to the Paleozoic carbonate sediments of the Upper Midwestern U.S. and continue investigating the Neoproterozoic of Australia.