About Me
I'm a planetary scientist fascinated by one of the biggest questions we can ask: what does it take for a world to become habitable, stay that way, or become uninhabitable? My research takes me across the solar system: from Mars, where I model how ancient eruptions loaded the atmosphere with sulfur and left chemical fingerprints in surface rocks, to Earth, where I study how massive lava outpourings may have repeatedly reset the conditions for life, to Titan, where I recreate exotic icy minerals in the lab that might be forming on its surface right now. I pursue these questions through a combination of fieldwork, laboratory experiments, and computational modeling.
My Research
My dissertation investigates how large-scale volcanism shapes planetary geochemistry and habitability, using Mars and Earth as complementary case studies.
- Martian sulfur degassing: Using chemical modeling to reconstruct the sulfur content of primary mantle melts through time, translating those estimates into a record of volcanogenic sulfur released to Mars' atmosphere over the planet's volcanic history. This is a key input for understanding how Mars' early atmosphere and potential for habitability evolved.
- Tharsis mantle plume Chemical and Physical Dynamics: Motivated by geophysical models of the Tharsis mantle plume, I model how progressive remelting of a large, heterogeneous mantle source can produce the chronological geochemical and mineralogical trends observed in Martian meteorites and surface basalts today, linking deep interior dynamics to the surface record we can actually measure.
- Columbia River Basalt Group: Characterizing the redox evolution of the CRBG across its full eruption history to constrain the redox state of its mantle source and disentangle the contributions of processes such as crustal contamination and sulfur degassing, with a comparative analysis against the North Atlantic and Central Atlantic Magmatic Provinces.
Beyond my dissertation, I'm a guest investigator with the NASA Dragonfly science team, creating cryominerals in the lab and characterizing them at the microscale with a DragonCam analog instrument to build a reference library for rapid interpretation of returned Titan surface imagery. Spanning Mars, Titan, and the Earth, these projects build toward a unified understanding of how volcanic systems, from their mantle origins to their atmospheric outputs, set the geochemical conditions that govern habitability.