Students
(Past and Present)
Cornelia Hermann (M.S. advisor, 2023-Present)
Conni is currently working with the coral and water samples we collected at Clipperton Atoll to try to better understand how the southern boundary of the Oxygen Deficient Zone in the Eastern Tropical North Pacific may have evolved over the 20th century
Camino Eck (M.S. advisor, 2022-2023)
Using corals collected by Jens Zinke, Mireille Guillaume, Heinrich Bruggeman and others, Camino reconstructed the nitrogen isotopic history of the Mozambique Channel across the 20th century. Ultimately this work is the first evidence that the Indian Ocean subtropical gyre expanded across the 20th century.
Alina Jaeger (M.S. co-advisor with N. Duprey, 2022)
For her M.S. thesis, Alina analyzed the carbon and nitrogen isotopic composition of coral tissue and of the symbionts that corals host to examine how different genera of corals in the Eastern Tropical Pacific partition resources in the coral holobiont. Alina produced very interesting results regarding the feeding behavior of Porites sp. compared with Pocillopora sp. that have implications for the nitrogen isotopic information recorded in the coral skeleton of each genera.
Robyn Granger (Ph.D. committee member, 2020-2023)
Robyn's work focuses on characterizing nutrient cycling in the Southeastern Atlantic Ocean and Southwestern Indian Ocean. The results from the modern groundtruthing studies Robyn conducted during her Ph.D. provide key insights as we try to characterize and interpret changes in the nitrogen isotopic composition of the fossil foraminifera collected from sediment cores in the Agulhas region and in the Southeastern Atlantic.
Jonathan Jung (M.S. co-advisor with N. Duprey, 2020-2021)
Jonathan's masters work focused on understanding the nitrogen isotopic changes in a Siderastrea siderea coral core from the Caribbean coastline of Costa Rica. Jonathan's work ultimately led him to characterize the nitrogen isotopic history of the entire Caribbean, which he is working on as a Ph.D. student in our laboratory!
Ongoing Collaborations:
Mark and Rachel Rohr Foundation and the S/Y Acadia
I have been fortunate to work closely with the Mark and Rachel Rohr Foundation and the crew of the S/Y Acadia over the past 3 years to make many of these field expeditions possible. The S/Y Acadia and the Rohr Foundation support many ocean conservation projects documenting the health of marine ecosystems and the impacts of climate change on these complex environments. The S/Y Acadia aims also to document the diversity of marine life on their voyages to remote locations around the globe and to help connect communities and scientists by fostering public discussion about marine conservation.
Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute
I work together with many researchers at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama to better characterize the variability in the Nitrogen cycle in the Eastern Tropical Pacific. We have several ongoing projects, which include: characterizing the upwelling history of the region; better understanding N cycling in the coral Holobiont across different coral genera; and documenting modern oceanographic in the ETP onboard the S/Y Eugen Seibold. Collaborators at STRI include Matthieu Leray, Sean Connolly, Andrew Sellers-Lara, Jonathan Cybulski, and Aaron O'Dea.
University of Costa Rica - CIMAR
Together with researchers at CIMAR, we have worked to build a climatic history of the ETP using coral cores from Cocos National Park. As part of a larger collaboration with STRI and the S/Y Acadia, I worked with CIMAR researchers to characterize Nitrogen cycling on the reefs of Cocos, and to better understand how the nutrient supply at Cocos may have changed over the last 50-100 years. We are continuing to build a better understanding of the region through oceanographic cruises onboard the S/Y Eugen Seibold. Collaborators at CIMAR include: Juan José Alvarado, Cindy Fernández-García, and Celeste Sanchez-Noguera.
Galapagos National Park and the Charles Darwin Foundation
I collected coral cores and seawater samples from islands around the Galapagos, with the goal of understanding changes in coral reef health across the archipelago over the last 50-100 years. Together with researchers from the Galapagos National Park and the Charles Darwin Foundation, we completed a 22 day research cruise that sampled at 7 different islands.
Save our Seas Foundation
We were able to work with researchers at d'Arros and St. Joseph Atoll to collect coral cores from around the two atolls. In combination with existing measurements that I have made on an older coral core, these samples will help characterize changes in the Indian Ocean over the last 100 years at monthly resolution. The Save Our Seas foundation focuses on conservation of sharks and rays in the world's ocean's as climate change and overfishing continue to threaten their populations; we hope to contribute an understanding of the natural cliamte variability at St. Joseph Atoll over the 20th and 21st centuries. We worked very closely with Henriette Grimmel and Robert Bullock on this project.
