Daniel is a biogeochemist and climate scientist specializing in the water and carbon cycles. His research encompasses the study of modern rivers and catchments, as well as the terrestrial geologic record—lakes, soils, and caves—to gain insights into Earth system processes that connect the biosphere, atmosphere, and lithosphere. The primary goal of this work is to understand how the Earth’s water and carbon cycles respond to various forcings, including ongoing anthropogenic climate change. Daniel's research also focuses on characterizing and quantifying lithium deposits in lacustrine basins and exploring enhanced weathering strategies for carbon dioxide removal. His tools include geochemical measurements, field observations, reactive transport modeling, hydrologic modeling, and the synthesis of climate model output.

Daniel is a Filipino-American geoscientist from Bozeman, Montana. He was born in Europe and grew up in Hong Kong. In 2020, he co-founded the Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in Geosciences organization. Additionally, he was a founding Advisory Council member of EarthArXiv, a preprint server for the Earth and Planetary Sciences, in 2017. In 2019, he served as a Republic of Philippines Balik Scientist at the University of the Philippines, Diliman.

Before joining Brown University, Daniel earned dual BS degrees in Civil & Environmental Engineering (Atmosphere/Energy program) and Geological & Environmental Sciences (with honors) from Stanford University in 2012. He went on to receive an MS in Geological Sciences in 2014, working with Kate Maher in the Environmental Geochemistry lab, and a PhD in Earth System Science in 2018, under the guidance of Page Chamberlain in the Terrestrial Paleoclimate lab. From 2019 to 2021, Daniel was a Miller Institute and President's Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley, working with Daniel Stolper in the Stable Isotope Geochemistry lab and Don DePaolo.

At Brown University, Daniel is appointed in the Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences (DEEPS), serves as Core Faculty and Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Institute at Brown for Environment & Society (IBES), is a member of the Executive Committee for the Initiative for Sustainable Energy (ISE), and leads Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility efforts for LunaSCOPE (Brown's NASA SSERVI Team). He is currently funded by external grants from NSF, NASA, DOE, and the Heising-Simons Foundation.

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