I’m a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Tropical Climate & Coral Reefs Lab in the University of Arizona’s Department of Geosciences. My research examines how and why climate changed in the past. This information can help us anticipate how climate might change in the future.

The tropical Pacific is key to answering these questions: the Pacific is a “pacemaker” of global climate, but climate observations in this vast and remote region are sparse. I use coral skeletal geochemistry to reconstruct past climate variability and trends in the tropical Pacific. My research focuses on:

• understanding temperature and hydrological variability, such as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation and Intertropical Convergence Zone, via new coral geochemical reconstructions, multi-site coral proxy networks, and proxy-model comparisons

• improving coral paleoclimate reconstructions by understanding the complex interplay between skeletal geochemistry and coral growth

• developing and interpreting coral skeletal records of past environmental stressors

I’ve also written a popular science article about our Marshall Islands research, available here.