Research

At Brown, I was working to understand the forcings of climate change in the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool during the late quaternary by reconstructing temperature (based on lipid membrane assemblages) and precipitation (based on carbon and hydrogen isotopes) measured in lake sediment cores from Lake Towuti in Indonesia. The composite Lake Towuti sediment record has lake sediment that spans the past 1.1 million years! I produced continuous temperature and hydroclimate records that extend back until 1.1 Ma. Understanding temperature and precipitation variation in Indonesia can help us uncover the driving forcings of climate in one of the most populated regions on Earth.

Here is a link to the first paper of my PhD, focusing on the mechanisms controlling temperature change during the last deglaciation: https://doi.org/10.1029/2022PA004501
- Link to data: https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.948194
Here is a link to the second paper of my PhD, focusing on the mechanisms controlling precipitation change during the last deglaciation: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2024.108755
- Links to data:
The final paper of my PhD will include the 1.1 Myr records of temperature and precipitation from Lake Towuti.

At the University of Wyoming, I produced temperature and precipitation records based on the abundances of different pollen taxa from lake sediment cores in and around the Mount Zirkel Wilderness in Colorado. The records span the past 2,500 years and showed a large increase in winter precipitation from the first millennium of the Common Era to the most recent millennium. I also produced a lake-level reconstruction based on grain size measurements in a transect of shallow cores from Silver Lake in Montana.

Here is a link to the paper about the pollen-based reconstructions from Colorado (you can also email me for a copy): https://doi.org/10.1017/qua.2019.85
- Link to data: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/study/32732
Here is a link to the paper about the lake-level reconstruction from Montana: https://doi.org/10.1017/qua.2022.17
- Link to data: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/paleo-search/study/36593