This month, I visited the Shuler Museum at Southern Methodist University to collect samples from Dallas and adjacent regions spanning the last ~50,000 years. Ultimately, we aim to build a record of terrestrial aridity from before the Last Glacial Maximum through the present using triple oxygen isotopes of herbivore tooth enamel. I’ll be excited to share more about this work and our findings in the coming months!!

This month I visited Yale's Peabody Mammalogy collection to select some modern specimens for triple oxygen isotope analysis. I'm excited to continue filling-in our understanding of how enamel triple oxygen isotopes vary among a range of taxa from North America!

I’m excited to announce my new position as a Postdoctoral Associate with Dr. Jordan Wostbrock at Yale University in the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences. In addition to the cutting-edge scientific research I anticipate performing in this role, I am enthusiastic about the wide range of opportunities that I will have at Yale to mentor students and participate in educational and public outreach programs through institutions like the Peabody Museum. I’m looking forward to this new adventure!

Our invited AGU talk on "Orbital-pacing of South American Monsoon Strength and Regional Water Balance: New Evidence from Triple Oxygen Isotopes" will be Tuesday, 10 December 2024 from 08:33 – 08:45 EST in Convention Center, 152 B. Thank you to the session conveners of GC21B: Climate Change, Variability, and Impacts in South America for this opportunity to share our research at Junin!

Check out the full abstract here: https://agu.confex.com/agu/agu24/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/1635180

Rackham Graduation. Left to right, Dr. Allison Curley, Dr. Fabian Hardy, Dr. Sarah Katz, and Dr. Zack Quirk.

Happy start of the semester from IsoPaleoLab!

Students are back on campus and the energy is high! Wishing everyone a great fall that is hopefully full of teaching successes, generation of new data, finishing old projects, and a fruitful conference season!

Back row (L to R): Ben Passey, Elena Lee, Julia Kelson, Anne Fetrow, Sarah Katz, Nick Ellis, Jungpyo Hong. Front row (L to R): Jada Langston, Kirsten Andrews, Naomi Levin, Million Mengesha, Georgia Oppenheim.

I'm happy to announce that I'll be presenting my work on the MIS-15 interval from Lake Junin at the GSA Annual meeting in Pittsburgh this October.

Check out my oral presentation, Large swings in tropical water balance during a 'weak' interglacial (MIS 15) suggest a link to precession-induced monsoon variability on Tuesday October 17th at 10:15 AM in Room 334. 

This month, I cohosted an information session on applying to the GSA Lowell Field Camp Scholarship for undergrad students who will be attending Camp Davis this summer! Field gear is expensive and I've seen firsthand as a Camp Davis Graduate Student Instructor how the financial burden can be a major obstacle for students at field camp. Too often, this burden is greatest for our non-traditional students and students from historically underrepresented groups, perpetuating inequities in fieldwork. In our info session, we introduced students to the Lowell application requirements, discussed how to request recommendation letters, and discussed how to draft a cover letter.

While preparing for the information session, we realized the GSA membership requirement ($45 annual fee for students) would likely be a barrier to some of our students. Working with our department and field director, we were able to find two funding solutions for students: the GSA membership fee waiver program and department funding. 

This month, I am excited to welcome sophomore Matthew Salinas to the Lake Junín project! Matthew got his start in the IsoPaleoLab (IPL) as a freshman working on soil waters and soil carbonates with Naomi and Julia Kelson. Now, Matthew will be working with me as I start to develop the temperature and water stress story at Lake Junín during the "penultimate" interglacial (MIS-5; 130,000-80,000 years BP). This exciting interval is often cited as being potentially analogous to future climate conditions, particularly during MIS-5e, as global temperature ~1.5-2.0 *C warmer than the present day.

This month, Matthew has already started analyzing some of our samples on XRD to confirm the carbonate mineralogy of the sediment-- a very important piece of information! In March, we will begin processing the bulk sediment to prepare for upcoming clumped and triple oxygen isotope analysis in the spring!

Funding for this work comes from a Scott Turner Award for graduate student research, which I received in Fall 2022.

This month, we welcomed Earth Camp to the UM BioStation in Pellston, MI!

We were excited to welcome 15 rising high school Juniors from the Detroit and Ypsilanti areas to the beautiful  BioStation at the end of July! 

For the past few months, I have been working on developing a hydrology module alongside my advisor, Naomi Levin, as part of her P2C2 NSF award (#2102843).

Some of the highlights of our three-day module included taking the students out on the BioStation pontoon and generating temperature, DO, and light intensity profiles in South Fishtail Bay (see image carousel). We also measured the surface expression of groundwater flow at the Carp Creek headwaters in the UMBS Gorge using digital flow meters.

These measurements  informed our group discussions of lake hydrology, turnover, water balance, and groundwater flow.

We are already looking forward to returning to running this module again next summer! 

Accepted to the 2022 Preparing Future Faculty Cohort!

I was thrilled to receive news that I've been accepted to this year's Preparing Future Faculty program, sponsored by UM's Rackham Graduate School and the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT)! I am looking forward to learning about teaching pedagogy and inclusive teaching practices, and to prepare a course syllabus and teaching statement as part of this program! PFF begins in May 2022 and runs until early June.