Research Interests

My research interests range broadly within atmospheric chemistry, biogeochemistry, climate, and sustainability. The environmental cycles of trace elements, many of which are important for human health, ecosystems, and/or climate, have been anthropogenically perturbed over the last several thousand years. Some of the impacts due to these changing trace element cycles are known: e.g, increasing sulfur emissions after the industrial revolution led to enhanced air pollution and climate cooling. However, for other elements and processes, the impacts are unknown or speculative. For example, how do trends in anthropogenic emissions of the essential element selenium affect human nutrition (CEE paper)? How important is deforestation as an anthropogenic source of the toxic pollutant mercury (ES&T paper)? My research aims to quantify the trends in trace elements for different environmental compartments and understand their impacts for ecosystems and health.

I am particularly interested in applying data science techniques to environmental science problems, while maintaining strong collaborations with experimental and field scientists to better understand the input data of models. I have applied several surrogate modelling techniques to better quantify uncertainties and parameter sensitivities in computationally complex models (e.g., publications in ACP, ES&T, GMD).