BS Chemistry, Monmouth University
BS Marine and Environmental Biology and Policy, Monmouth University
MS Ocean Ecology and Biogeochemistry, Oregon State University

I’m a chemical oceanographer interested in seafloors and coastal boundaries as interfaces of the modern carbon cycle. As a grad student my work focuses on characterizing nutrient release from the seafloor via sampling of the lower water column and the interstitial pore waters between grains in the living ‘marine soils’ underlying those waters.

I completed a masters here at Oregon State developing electrochemical approaches to detect dissolved oxygen in seawater and was also an REU in our group’s previous home at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in 2013. Analytically, I’m striving to combine high frequency in situ approaches like eddy covariance with ex situ measurement to investigate the poorly constrained nature of analyte flux across the marine benthic boundary layer.

My current support is thanks to Oregon Sea Grant, who has funded the group to look at the effect groundfish bottom trawling has on Oregon seafloor communities and sediment geochemistry in areas that were previously closed to fishing. Seafloor sediments on the continental shelf, in addition to being literal habitat for many commercially valuable species, play an inseparable role in regulating the chemistry of benthic and near-seafloor habitats and act as a capacitor of micronutrients that can fuel primary productivity in our coastal seas.

Research Interests

• Sediment biogeochemistry
• Applied electrochemistry
• Transition metal-organic interactions and microbial ecology
• Biogeochemistry of metal-replete aqueous systems
• Carbon cycling at the seafloor