Building a better fossil toolkit.

Much of our information about the planet’s past comes from fossilized microorganisms such as foraminifera (shown at right). Because foraminifera form their shells from ions dissolved in seawater, we can analyze the chemical composition of their fossilized shells to learn about the seas they lived in – and, by extension, about all the other interconnected parts of the Earth system, from the circulation of ocean currents to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

I build tools to better extract and understand these data. I work especially on vital effects, biological processes that can overwrite the environmental information recorded in fossils. By better understanding how organisms like foraminifera form their shells, we can disentangle the biological part of the signal from the environmental part of the signal and better understand both the ancient environment and the creatures that lived in it.

  • Planktonic foraminifera

Understanding warmer worlds.

What happens when the planet heats up – or cools down? Microfossils are found all over the world and continuously build up on the seafloor, much like tree rings, so they can give us an extraordinarily high-resolution window into Earth’s past compared to other types of fossils. I use microfossils to examine the ecological effects of specific climate-change events such as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, as well as more general questions about how Earth’s biogeochemical cycles change over time.