Research Interest
The ocean is an integral part of the Earth's climate system. Paleoceanography, or the study of past oceans, helps explain how the ocean impacts, and is affected by, climate. As analytical techniques improve and new proxies are developed, we are able to study the past ocean variability with similar approaches that are used to study the modern ocean. Currently, I am focusing on reconstructing past temperature variability off the coast of Ecuador in the thermocline (~75-250 m depth) during the past 10,000 years. The objective of my project is to determine how thermocline temperature has driven and/or responded to past climate variability. We currently do not know if the sea surface and thermocline temperatures changed together or independently, but improving our knowledge of the interactions between thermocline and surface temperature has important implications for the understanding of El Nino, decadal variability in the Pacific and heat transport. All of this affects regional and potentially global climate.

Background Information
I grew up in Southern California and did my undergraduate work at Scripps College, where I majored in Chemistry. Before moving east and starting my graduate studies, I taught chemistry for two years, and that is when I became interested in oceanography, largely because of its interdisciplinary nature. Before coming to Rutgers I did my masters in Rhode Island, at the Graduate School in Oceanography. I hope to contribute by extending our data records farther back in time so that we can better understand how the ocean and climate are related.

On a coring cruise on the Demarara Rise. We were waiting for a sediment core to come back on on deck.

Working in lab separating diatoms (phytoplankton) from the rest of the sediment.

During the same coring cruise, I was going in the "basket" to the top of the core. We put in pipes used to push the core out of the coring apparatus and other people were at the bottom of the core to collect it.

On a beach in Rhode Island measuring erosion.