Lindsay Brin

B.A. Swarthmore College (Biology and Environmental Studies), 2005. M.A. Boston University Marine Program (Biology), 2008. “Nitrogen retention and export in experimental salt marsh plots exposed to chronic nutrient addition.”

Lindsay is interested in the biogeochemistry of coastal systems, and, specifically, the environmental and anthropogenic controls that alter estuarine biogeochemical cycles. In her research, she takes a broad ecological perspective on questions relevant to the reciprocal interaction between humans and our environment, while using a more detailed approach toward investigating the rules that define functioning of estuarine ecosystems at a very basic, chemical level. She is working on a disseration project with Jeremy Rich (CES) and Anne Giblin (MBL) that will focus on the role of temperature as a key driver of ecosystem processes along a latitudinal gradient. Lindsay will investigate how temperature regulates the magnitude and types of estuarine N cycling processes, by affecting both the rates of processes and the relative abundance of different functional groups within microbial communities.

Keryn Bromberg

B.A. Tufts University (Biology and Environmental Studies), 2002.
"Effects of nitrogen availability on young gypsy moth larvae."

I am interested in the response of New England salt marshes to anthropogenic perturbations. New England salt marshes, like salt marshes in many other regions in the world, have a long history of human use and exploitation, including farming of salt hay, use as natural pasture, drainage for conversion to freshwater agriculture, filling to create upland space, and ditching for mosquito control. I am interested in the consequences of this history of human interaction for salt marsh species distributions, ecosystem processes, and ecological services. Remaining salt marshes in New England continue to provide crucial ecosystem services, as storm buffers, water filtration systems, nitrogen exporters, and carbon sinks. I am particularly interested in how global anthropogenic impacts, such as climate change and eutrophication will affect salt marsh ecosystems and the services they provide.

Regan Early

PhD, 2007, University of York, UK. "Conservation at the Landscape scale, the Marsh Fritillary and other British Butterflies"
BA, 2002, Oxford University, UK.

My research concerns species range contractions and expansions; the mechanisms which drive them and their implications for conservation planning. I am interested in deriving principles from in depth studies and applying them to large-scale multi-species problems. I work with several environmental organizations to develop practical conservation plans which are scientifically informed. Currently I am working on the ecological and evolutionary processes by which species respond to climate change. I work in the Sax lab (http://www.brown.edu/Research/Sax_Research_Lab/).

Shelby Hayhoe

Shelby Hayhoe is interested in the interaction of biogeochemical cycling, ecosystem functioning, and anthropogenic land use changes. For her undergraduate research in rural Iowa - an area that has seen some of the most rapid and complete land use change in the world - she looked at nutrient loading in stream and lake systems. She has also worked in Brazil, a region under immense development pressure, for Chris Neill of MBL, who was looking at nutrients and hydrologic flowpaths in small streams, comparing catchments in tropical forest and pasture.  Most recently, she conducted sampling of impaired waterbodies in Minnesota and working on hazardous material clean ups as a consultant. Her PhD advisor is Stephen Porder and her dissertation work will focus on the effects of forest and pasture conversion to intensive soybean agriculture in Brazil. 

Matt Heard

Matt Heard is a second year Ph.D. student in the Ecology & Evolutionary Biology program. He is advised by Dr. Dov Sax, who shares a joint appointment in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies. Matt’s general research interests include understanding the ecological and evolutionary consequences of land use change and species invasions. His research focuses specifically on how agricultural expansion, increasing urbanization, and a rise in exotic species can impact native biodiversity and ecosystems. Prior to coming to Brown, Matt received a B.A. in Ecology and French from the honors program at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.

Karen Holmberg

A postdoctoral fellow in archaeology, Karen's research interests center upon highly interdisciplinary ways to ‘think’ volcanoes as emblematic examples of the long-term intersection between human life and changeable environments. She is particularly interested in the very dynamic ways that culture encapsulates mutable natures in narratives.

Her doctoral research at Columbia University focused upon fieldwork conducted in western Panamá, where she incorporated traditional archaeological field survey and artifact analysis, ethnography, ethnohistory, and petrographic analysis of tephra from archaeological stratigraphy and lake-sediment cores. She explored new ways to examine rock art and volcanic materials used in grave construction and used a GIS to integrate satellite imagery and the deceptive precision of GPS points with less easily georeferenced data from historical maps, hearsay, rumor, and descriptions of looted site locations.

Current research projects explore conceptions of material culture and material nature and how we view and value them. I am examining the importance of William Hamilton’s Campi Phlegraei (1776) and Alexander von Humboldt’s 1799-1804 New World travels in modern scientific conceptions of volcanism. In a separate project I am querying the social value we give to landscapes and have recently completed trips to the Antarctic Peninsula and Amazonia to examine these issues through the lens of ecotourism and heritage. In future projects I intend to examine the parallels and overlaps in the ways that the lived experience of volcanic regions intersects with that of glacial regions as well as ways that geological conceptions are incorporated into contemporary art and literature.

My past fieldwork experiences have been in Athens, Belize, El Salvador, Papua New Guinea, and both prehistoric and historic sites in Virginia. I will be teaching two courses in 2009-2010: ‘The Nature and Culture of Disaster’ and ‘Archaeology under the Volcano’. I will also be planning a colloquium for December 2009, Terra Mobilis: Fire and Ice.

Bronwen Konecky

Bronwen is a first-year Ph.D. student with James Russell in the Department of Geological Sciences. She is interested in applying a paleoclimate perspective to understanding abrupt climate change and precipitation variability in the tropics. Her current research focuses on East African hydroclimate variability, applying organic geochemical paleoclimate proxies to sediment cores from the African rift lakes. Bronwen received a B.A. in Environmental Science in 2005 from Barnard College, Columbia University, where she studied ecological responses to tropical deglaciation in the Andes. Before coming to Brown she worked for a sustainable development initiative at the Earth Institute at Columbia University, coordinating environmental research and development activities in rural African villages.

Lindsay McAlpine

Lindsay McAlpine is an undergraduate concentrator in Environmental Science with a focus in Ecosystems and Design. Her senior thesis research with Stephen Porder looks at the impact of garlic mustard, an invasive species, and the efforts to control its spread in the Berkshire Hills region. She is examining the effectiveness and economic efficiency of the Nature Conservancy's efforts to control garlic mustard using herbicides.

Lara Reichmann

Lara Reichmann works on an experiment located in the Chihuahuan Desert, as part of the Jornada Basin Long term Ecological Research Site (LTER). By independently manipulating precipitation and nitrogen inputs, researchers are able to tease out controls on patterns of plant productivity. Lara works with Osvaldo Sala at Brown University and Debra Peters at New Mexico State University.

Juliet Simpson

My fundamental research interests lie in the interactions between humans and aquatic systems. I work primarily with plants and algae in wetlands, streams, and lakes, studying their responses to human perturbations such as nutrient enrichment, habitat alteration, and introduction of invasive species. Some of my past research has focused on:

• impacts of the invasive reed Phragmites australis on native salt marsh plants in New England;
• the cascading influence of nitrogen enrichment on plant communities in coastal wetlands in California;
• the physical, chemical, and biological changes generated in streams by urbanization;
• regulation and preservation of water quality in streams and rivers in central and southern California, where the needs of agriculture, native ecology, and rapidly growing human populations are increasingly coming into conflict over limited supplies of fresh water.

Jessica Tierney

As a paleoclimatologist, I believe that to better understand the future, one must look to the past. My research focuses on tropical paleoclimate, with an emphasis on understanding how the hydrologic cycle in the tropics has changed through time. I am interested in investigating tropical climate throughout geologic history, though my current work focuses on climatic variability over suborbital to multidecadal timescales during the Pleistocene and Holocene. I utilize both terrestrial and oceanic archives to reconstruct a variety of parameters such as rainfall, surface temperature, productivity and oxygenation history. I am particularly interested in the application of organic ‘biomarkers’ - the molecular remains of algae and higher plants - towards paleoclimatic purpose. Specifically, I use the stable isotope composition of such biomarkers to track changes in ecosystem carbon cycling (d13C) and the hydrologic cycle (dD).

Jaime Toney

Jaime is a Ph.D. student in the department of Geological Sciences. Her research focuses on using lake sediments to answer questions concerning continental climate change. She works with Geology Professor Dr. Yongsong Huang to develop and utilize new organic geochemical proxies for climate research. Her primary research project is a collaboration with Dr. Sherilyn Fritz (University of Nebraska) to understand the links between drought in the Northern Great Plains and past global climate drivers, such as SST changes in the Tropical Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.

Véronique St-Louis

Véronique joins ECI as an interdisciplinary postdoctoral scientist, working with Dov Sax and Jack Mustard. Her research lies at the intersection of landscape ecology, remote sensing, and statistics. Understanding the factors that limit the spatial distribution of species across a range of spatial scales and ecosystem types has always been at the center of her work. Her research at Brown is focused on the response of plant species to future changes in climatic conditions in the Eastern US. Specifically, Véronique is interested in understanding how ecological as well as human-induced factors (e.g., land use and land cover change) will interact to affect a given species’ ability to cope with future changes in climatic conditions, and how these factors will affect the species’ risk of extinction.  She received her Ph.D. Forest Ecology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2009 as well as an MS in Biometry from University of Wisconsin-Madison, in 2009 and an MS in Biological Sciences from Université de Montréal in 2000.

Sheila Walsh

B.S. Biological Sciences, Stanford University, 2002
Ph.D. Marine Biology, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California-San Diego, 2009. Thesis: “Linking Coral Reef Health and Human Welfare.”

Sheila’s research focuses on the interrelationship between ecosystem change and human welfare. Conservation and economic development are inextricably linked, especially in developing countries where the majority of wealth is derived from natural resources. I use theoretical and empirical methods from ecology and economics to understand this relationship and to evaluate policies relevant to conservation and development. Her current research, with Heather Leslie (EEB) and Sriniketh Nagavarapu (Economics), aims to understand the consequences of conditional cash transfers (a popular poverty alleviation policy) in the Gulf of California, Mexico on fishing, coastal ecosystems, and long-term changes in human welfare.

Amity Wilczek

Ph.D. Harvard University, 2004. Thesis title: "The Roles of Life History and Environmental Heterogeneity in the Evolution of Maternal Effects in Plants."

Amity's research interests lie in how plants integrate complex clues and signals into an environmentally appropriate response. For plants that occupy a wide range of habitats, what consitutes an appropriate response to a given environmental cue in one habitat may not be adaptive in another. My current research seeks to elucidate how geographic variation in selection pressures shapes plant response through a combination of phenotypic and genetic analyses.

Former ECI Associates

Pedro Flombaum

B.S. Biology, Universidad de Buenos Aires, 1997
PhD Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Brown University, 2008

Working in Osvaldo Sala's research group, Pedro Flombaum studied the effects of plant species diversity on ecosystem functioning. Using manipulative experiments in the Patagonian steppe, he found that primary production was positively associated with the diversity of plant species. In fact, the biodiversity effect in this natural ecosystem was much larger than previously reported for artificial ecosystems. His research suggests that the loss of natural biodiversity may have larger consequences for ecosystem functioning than previously thought. Pedro is now a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California Irvine.

Gillian Galford

Gillian Galford is a Ph.D. student in the Brown-MBL graduate program. Her thesis addresses the impacts of land-cover and land-use change on carbon and nitrogen cycling, particularly the emission of carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide greenhouse gases, in the Brazilian Amazon.  She works with Brown Professor of Geological Sciences John Mustard and MBL Ecosystems Center Co-director Jerry Melillo. This collaboration represents a fusing of research expertise across the two institutions as Gillian integrates tools of remote sensing and biogeochemical modeling. This work is supported by a NASA Earth And Space Science Fellowship Program and through collaboration with colleagues at the University of Sao Paulo under the Large-Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia (LBA). In Fall 2009, Gillian begins a postdoctoral position with the Earth Institute at Columbia University

Lucía Vivanco

Working with Osvaldo Sala at Brown and Amy Austin at the University of Buenos Aires, Lucía focused on terrestrial ecosystem ecology. She has several experiments in the Patagonian forest of Argentina, examining the effects of plant diversity on carbon and nutrient cycling. A second area of research is the relative importance of biotic and abiotic controls on litter decomposition in the Patagonian steppe. Lucía is now a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California Irvine.

Joaquin Chaves

Joaquin Chaves is a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Stephen Porder. He is working on a project examining the relationship between soil age, erosion rates, and soil fertility in tropical soils. The research takes a hard look at the common generalization that unglaciated tropical soils are old, and therefore low in phosphorous.  The project involves field sites in lowland forests of Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Costa Rica.