In March of 2025 I started my PhD at the Carbonate Clumped Isotope group led by Martin Ziegler. Together with Martin and my promotor Lucas Lourens I'm aiming to improve ocean temperature reconstructions of the past 5 million years, a project that is part of the Past To Future consortium. The Plio-Pleistocene is a truly fascinating interval of Earth's climatic history featuring a 400ppm CO2 world that's often used as a semi-analogue of future climate, the intensification of Northern Hemisphere glaciations, and the onset of 鈥渕odern鈥� Ice Ages across the Mid-Pleistocene transition.
I'm particularly interested in understanding what the varying contributions of bottom water temperature and global ice volume to benthic oxygen isotopes were across this time and what this meant for the evolution of global surface climate, Earth System climate sensitivity, and ice-sheet (in)stability. An ideal tool to approach these questions is clumped isotope thermometry from benthic foraminifera, which is great because I love working at the Stable Isotopes lab! Some of my other ongoing/upcoming projects also involve Pliocene surface temperature reconstructions using planktic foram Mg/Ca-clumped, and (of course!) clumped isotope calibrations.
In Spring of 2025 I was lucky enough to participate in the Breaking Science competition and receive the first prize. Here's the (low quality) clip of my pitch where I described the overarching goals of "Past To Future".
And here's a gorgeous Amphistegina lessonii to brighten up your day :) Cultured by our friends at NIOZ and later measured for clumped with the purpose of constraining foram calibrations.
