Bio
At Rutgers, I serve as an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Director of the Core Spectroscopy Laboratory, and Co-Director of the Rutgers–IODP Core Repository. I earned my B.S. from Rutgers and my Ph.D. from Columbia University, where my dissertation examined the timing of rift and post-rift magmatism along the Eastern North American Margin. Before returning to Rutgers as faculty in 2025, I worked as a postdoctoral research scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
Research
A common thread through my research is the use of high-resolution records from rock and sediment cores to address questions in geochronology, geochemistry, scientific drilling, and Earth history. My interests range from the tectonic and magmatic evolution of eastern North America and Early Mesozoic climate and astrochronology to broader questions about how stratigraphy influences the distribution, mobility, and concentration of metals and other elements in geologic systems. Much of this research relies on geochronology, elemental geochemistry, and spectroscopic analysis, often within broad collaborations that also draw on expertise in isotope geochemistry, paleomagnetism, paleontology, stratigraphy, and climate dynamics.
Much of this work grows out of large, collaborative research programs and the use of geological core collections and shared analytical infrastructure. I am actively involved in the development of open-source data infrastructure for scientific drilling and geological core collections, with the goal of integrating legacy and newly generated datasets in ways that make them easier to preserve, discover, compare, and reuse. The Rutgers–IODP Core Repository serves as a testbed for building more consistent, community-oriented approaches to managing scientific drilling data. I also contribute to several team-based efforts, including the CycloAstro Project , which uses the geologic record to investigate Solar System dynamics and Earth-system responses to astronomical forcing, as well as International Continental Scientific Drilling Program projects including Paleogene Earth Perturbations (PEP-US) and the Colorado Plateau Coring Project 2 (CPCP-2) .
Teaching
My teaching spans a range of undergraduate courses at both the introductory and upper levels, with an emphasis on experiential learning and giving students opportunities to reason from observations, work with real data, and approach problems in ways that parallel scientific practice. The Core Repository serves as an important home base for this kind of experiential learning, giving undergraduate and graduate students hands-on experience with analytical instrumentation, data analysis, and project-based research. I also mentor undergraduate and graduate students across a range of collaborative research projects.