Our planet is shaped by the interaction of living things with their physical environment. My interests center on understanding these interactions. Since I trained as an oceanographer, my primary expertise is in how the ocean circulates and influences marine life, climate, and atmospheric chemistry. I got my Ph.D. from the MIT/Woods Hole Joint Program in Physical Oceanography and spent over fifteen years in Princeton at Princeton University and NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory working to develop computer models of how the planet works. In January 2011 I joined the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. I served as department chair from July 2018-2021 and from May of 2023 to July of 2024.
My group's research is currently focused in three major areas
1. Representing climate processes: Climate models try to faithfully represent physical and biological processes or their impacts. Areas of long-term interest include the representation of turbulence at scales ranging from centimeters to tens of kilometers, capturing the impacts of ocean color and understanding the controls on the growth of phytoplankton.
2. Understanding how these processes shape Earth's climate.I'm interested in the large scale circulation of the ocean and how it interacts with the biosphere and carbon cycle, as well as the role of aerosols such as mineral dust and black carbon.
3. Characterizing variability in the climate system. I'm interested in variability and change on a range of scales, from interannual variability associated with El Nino, to detecting biological and physical tipping points driven by anthropogenic climate change, to understanding multi-millennial variability in the carbon cycle.
More information on each of these topics can be found by clicking on the "Research areas" tab.
270.103: Introduction to Global Environmental Change and Sustainability (fall semesters)
270.224: Oceans and Atmospheres (Spring semesters)
270.323: Ocean Biogeochemical Cycles (last taught Spring 2024)
270.325: Introductory Oceanography (Spring 2021,2023)
270.327: Field Experience in Bermuda (Intersession 2018, 2019, 2023)
270.425: Earth and Planetary Fluids (co-taught, alternate fall semesters, last taught 2023)
270.611: Advanced Atmospheric Dynamics (Last taught, Fall 2016)
270.620: Seminar in Geophysical Turbulence (Last taught,Fall 2015)
270.644: Physics of Climate Variability (Fall 2014, 2024)
270.654: Environmental Data Analysis (Last taught, Fall 2017)
I’ve been very involved in Science Olympiad, the nation’s largest team science competition. Click here for more information.
November 2023: Congratulations to graduate student Leone Yisrael whose first paper was just accepted at Diversity and Distributions.
June 2024: Congratulations to graduate student Rui Jin, who defended her dissertation and is starting a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Washington.
August 2024: Paper with former graduate students Rui Jin and Chris Holder on how environmental controls for particulate organic and inorganic carbon differ is accepted at Geophysical Research Letters.
