Miquela Ingalls is an Assistant Professor of Geosciences and faculty in the Biogeochemistry and Astrobiology programs at Penn State. Miquela studies modern and ancient carbonate environments, with a particular interest in how microbes interact with carbonate minerals in lakes. Miquela's group uses elemental, stable, and clumped isotope techniques to reconstruct past environments, biology, and aqueous chemistry.

Brian Kelley is an Assistant Professor of Geosciences at Penn State who investigates the relationship between environmental change, biological evolution, and carbonate sedimentation. Brian also worked as an industry geoscientist, where he studied world-class carbonate reservoirs in the Middle East, Europe, South America, and North America.  

Kim Lau, Assistant Professor in Geosciences, is a sedimentary geochemist. She combines inorganic geochemical proxies, fieldwork, and modeling to understand paleoenvironmental change during critical intervals in the past as windows into the Earth system, as well as to improve our interpretations of the sedimentary geochemical record.

Estelle Couradeau is an Assistant Professor of Soils and Environmental Microbiology and faculty in the Ecology, Biogeochemistry, and Astrobiology programs at Penn State. Dr. Couradeau’s group studies soils and biocrusts using cutting-edge spectroscopic, microscopic and molecular ecology approaches with the goal of understanding how they function to cycle nutrients and how they will respond to climate change.

Max is an Assistant Professor of Geosciences at Penn State. He uses new geochemical tools to tackle unresolved questions regarding surface and near-surface processes on Earth, combining hard isotopic analyses and simple models to understand how these processes work today, and how they may have operated in the past. 

Mackenzie is a Geobiology PhD candidate at New Mexico Tech working with cave-forming sulfur oxidizing bacteria to assess their bioleaching and bioremediation potential, as well as their role in nitrogen cycling in sulfidic cave systems. She holds a BA in Geology and an MSc in Geochemistry. She also has previous experience working as a production geologist at a high-altitude copper mine in the Peruvian Andes.