Aislinn E. Deely - Research

Current Research

Alaskan Arctic Photochemistry

Photochemical processing of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) in inland waters is an important component of the Arctic carbon budget. Photochemical processes can convert DOC to CO₂ (a greenhouse gas) and influence microbial respiration of DOC. Understanding how sunlight alters DOC in these abundant surface waters and the microbial response to this sunlight-exposed DOC is crucial to understanding carbon cycling in the Arctic.

Undergraduate Research

I first developed an interest in research while in high school working with Dr. Bonnie Blackwell. I worked with her to develop a new method to calculate cosmic dose rates for carbonate samples collected at the surface (Deely et al. 2011) and constructed a sea level curve for San Salvador, Bahamas by ESR (electron spin resonance) dating corals and molluscs (Deely et al. 2010) dating back hundreds of thousands of years.

To complete my B.S. in Environmental Science from the CUNY Macaulay Honors College, I completed an honors thesis with Dr. Nicholas Coch, investigating anthropogenic actions that halted the deposition of coarse material in the Harlem and East Rivers of New York City (Coch et al, 2017). We used our own facies map in combination with colonial maps to determine where urbanization had greatly changed sediment in these urban estuaries. Yankee Stadium now sits on the delta of a former waterway that brought coarse sediment to the Harlem River!

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