I am a research assistant professor with the Glacier Research Group, which is
part of the Institute for the Study of Earth Oceans and Space at the University
of New Hampshire, Durham. My appointment includes an affiliation with the
Department of Earth Sciences. (I am in the midst of the review process for
promotion to research associate professor in both units.) This is a grant
funded (soft money) position, so my primary responsibility is to keep myself
and my program (graduate students and field campaigns) funded. I operate a
radionuclide counting facility, but also rely on the ion chromatography
laboratory in the Glacier Research Group for much of my research.
I have a general interest in biogeochemical cycles, especially how natural and
anthropogenic radionuclide tracers can be used to understand transport within
and between reservoirs. My major research foci are atmospheric chemistry and
transport, and clarification of the relationships between the composition of
glacial snow and ice and the air from which they fell. This enables a more
rigorous interpretation of the glaciochemical records recovered from ice
cores (the specialty of the Glacier Research Group).
I am the coordinator of a multi-institutional research
program at Summit, Greenland that is making progress in both areas, and have
also participated in two recent missions in the NASA Global Troposphere
Experiment.
I have a BS from the University of Puget Sound, MS and PhD from the State
University of New York at Binghamton (all in geology). My master's thesis
research involved numerical modeling of contaminant transport in groundwater at
a Super Fund site in Vestal, NY. For my dissertation, I used Be-7 as a natural
tracer to examine the transport and deposition of fine particles in the
Chesapeake Bay (I spent 3 years at the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory in
Solomons, MD, conducting this research).
My undergraduate education in geology impressed upon me the fact that most, if
not all, of the growing number of environmental concerns were due to actions
that were absurd from the point of view of even limited understanding of
geological processes. I went on to graduate school hoping to learn more about
the interface between earth processes and society, so I could advise against
"bad" actions from a position of some authority. Along the way, I became more
and more interested in geochemistry, which does include pollution aspects, but
is also quite enthralling in terms of understanding natural cycles (against
which any perturbations need to be considered).
In the coming year I will be returning to Greenland and really focusing on
questions about nitrogen chemistry in the Arctic atmosphere and how this
chemistry results in the dominance of nitrate in surface snow at most sites on
the ice sheet. In the meantime, I will be analyzing and interpreting the
results from our recent trip to South Pole, writing up the findings from the
NASA mission conducted in spring of 1994, and working to start a program of
air/snow exchange studies in West Antarctica.
At home in New Hampshire I am looking forward to some cross country skiing in
the next few months and am anticipating the birth of our first cria (baby
alpaca) in late July.