Professor Will Berelson
Prof. Will Berelson studies biogeochemical cycles of biologically important elements (C, Si, N etc) from the perspective of fluxes including atmospheric (urban) CO2 and other constituents, upper, middle and deep ocean, shallow (m’s) sediments with a particular focus on the CaCO3 cycle in the ocean, geobiological processes that create biosignatures and our urban CO2 sources and sinks.
Professor Sarah Feakins
Professor Sarah Feakins uses the techniques of organic geochemistry to study ocean sediments collected by the International Ocean Discovery Program to reconstruct climate and vegetation on land, especially during warm periods of earth’s history, addressing questions about the evolution of tropical grasslands, changes in monsoonal climates and our human ancestors.
Professor Noelle Held
Noelle Held studies the inner workings of marine microbes and how this influences ocean biogeochemistry at small and large scales. Her group specialises in environmental proteomics, systems biology, microbial ecology, and ocean biogeochemistry.
Professor Seth John
Professor Seth John studies the biogeochemical cycling of trace-metal micronutrients in the oceans, with research including the analysis of metals and metal isotopes in seawater, biological experiments testing the bioavailability of metals to phytoplankton, computer modeling of metal cycling in the global oceans, and research cruises and fieldwork to study the impact of trace-metals on marine communities in situ.
Professor Naomi Levine
Professor Levine’s research focuses on understanding the interactions between climate and marine microbial ecosystem composition and function. The Levine Lab is developing innovative, interdisciplinary numerical models that allow them to understand how dynamics occurring at the scale of individual microbes impact large-scale ecosystem processes such as rates of global carbon cycling.
Professor Jim Moffett
Professor Drew Steen
Associate Professor Drew Steen is a geomicrobiologist interested in microbe-organic matter interactions, particularly in low-energy environments such as deep marine sediments. He uses bioinformatics, computational modeling, and in situ rate measurements to understand how heterotrophic microbes interact with the Earth’s biogeochemical cycles. He will begin working at USC in August 2024.
Professor Lowell Stott
Professor Stott’s research seeks to understand what factors have influenced the behavior of Earth’s climate system over time, research that entails the acquisition of observations of atmosphere and ocean variables spanning years to millennia
Professor Cameron Thrash
The Thrash lab investigates the relationships among and between aquatic microorganisms and their environment by combining high throughput culturing, physiology, and pure culture multi-omics techniques with cultivation independent methods (e.g., meta-omics and single-cell genomics), to ultimately understand why microorganisms occur where they do and their functions in nature.
Professor Josh West
Recognizing that some of the most important things about the oceans start on land, Prof. West works on land surface processes, present and past — yet with a major focus on the material delivered to the oceans by rivers, especially carbon, sediment, and dissolved elements. His group applies a range of techniques drawn from hydrology and isotope geochemistry. These tools are brought to bear to understand modern river fluxes and to reconstruct how they changed in the past, for example using the isotopic composition of past seawater as recorded in carbonates and the chemical information encoded in clastic sedimentary archives.