Although I did not travel to attend GSA in person, I was excited to present some in-press research on the mechanistic drivers of the end-Permian mass extinction (hopefully will be able to share, soon!) as well as ongoing work on carbonate diagenesis and paleoredox proxies with Dalton Hardisty. The session conveners did a wonderful job managing the hybrid setup and I was glad to be able to interact with the in-person audience. I also loved seeing photos of friends and students who attended!

I am very honored to be named this year's Geobiology and Geomicrobiology (GBGM) Division Pre-tenure awardee. A heartfelt thank you to my nominators for their support and a big congrats to fellow awardees Dr. Frank Corsetti and Dr. Phoebe Cohen. The "lunch" zoom meeting was very fun, too -- very grateful to be a part of the GBGM family and many thanks to the leadership (including Vicky Petryshyn, Lydia Tackett, Rowan Martindale, David Gold, Zoe Havlena, Trinity Hamilton, Emmy Smith, and Brant Gibson) for fostering this community.

A big round of applause to PhD student Fai Chanchai, who has been named the recipient of several awards! Woohoo!!

• The Lipman Research Award, GSA Mineralogy, Geochemistry, Petrology, and Volcanology Division
• The Charles E. Knopf Memorial Scholarship, Penn State Geosci. The Knopf award provides recognition and financial assistance for research by outstanding first-year graduate students.
• The Hiroshi and Koya Ohmoto Graduate Fellowship, Penn State Geosci. The Ohmoto award recognizes and supports graduate students exhibiting academic excellence.
• The Paul D. Krynine Award, Penn State Geosci.

Congrats to lead-author Lucien Nana Yobo, University of Houston, on this paper now in press in Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta!
​Click here for link.

This work was co-authored with Alan Brandon (U of Houston), Chris Holmden (U of Saskatchewan), and James Eldrett (Shell) and was supported by a grant from NSF.

I'm very excited to welcome Dr. Chelsie Bowman to Penn State! Dr. Bowman recently completed her PhD at Florida State University, and will be working on nutrient cycling and redox through the lens of the Phosphoria Formation of the Western U.S. So excited to see our lab growing. Another member to our socially distant, masked, hybrid pandemic-era group meetings. (A snapshot from a warm fall day below.)

I am a co-author on a paper led by Brian Kelley, titled Controls on carbonate platform architecture and reef recovery across the Paleozoic to Mesozoic transition: A high-resolution analysis of the Great Bank of Guizhou, published in Sedimentology. The figure above highlights the description of the first reef metazoans (sponges, Sp) in a microbial framework (Tubiphytes, Tb) after the end-Permian extinction. A link to the paper is here.

Today's special issue in Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta has two publications to highlight. The first is a reactive transport model of uranium isotopes in marine reducing environments that was started as a Ph.D. project and completed as part of my postdoc: Uranium reduction and isotopic fractionation in reducing sediments: Insights from reactive transport modeling. The model allows us to explore the important depositional factors that ultimately control seawater uranium isotopes. Check out the figure below and download the PDF here. 

Feifei Zhang and colleagues also have published a review on the uranium isotope proxy in carbonates, titled Uranium isotopes in marine carbonates as a global ocean paleoredox proxy: A critical review. You can download the PDF here.

I am so pleased to welcome Kaitlin Taylor (M.S. student) and Fai (Watsawan) Chanchai (Ph.D. student) to the group. Kaitlin and Fai join Bri McMaster Smith, a B.S. candidate from the University of Wyoming who has been an undergraduate researcher in the lab for the past year. I am excited for all of the science to come!

This summer, I will be starting a new position as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geosciences at Penn State. I will miss my friends, colleagues, and students at the University of Wyoming very much. I had a fun, supportive, and wonderful time in Laramie for a year and a half. I am looking forward to building my lab group and research at Penn State. Friends and colleagues, please let me know if you are ever in the area -- still just off of I-80!

I am a co-author on a comprehensive review on the role of diagenesis on the geochemistry of the carbonate record. Thanks to Matt Fantle for leading this effort and for including me, and to Ben for a fun collaboration! I learned a lot from this deep dive into the history of carbonate diagenesis and evolution of the thinking on this topic. Please visit this link for a copy.