My research is focused on the Anthropocene (broadly defined), specifically the onset, tempo, and trajectory of human impacts on biological processes and environmental change. What about us as a species predisposes us to environmental modification? How did the development of modern society through urbanism and agriculture set us off a course of global anthropogenic change? What are the geochemical fingerprints of those changes, and can we use those fingerprints to track change in the modern era, as well as in the recent geologic past? The goal of my research program is understand the intimate ties between people and ecosystems across many different timescales using geochemistry, and how these environmental records provide the crucial data needed to understand the modern planet during the Anthropocene as we know it.

“[People are] a part of nature, and [our] war against nature is inevitably a war against [ourselves]." - Rachel Carson

(Photo credits, left to right: K. Chritz, K.Chritz, Taylor Mickal)