Welcome to the “CritChem” research group
Low temperature water-rock interactions play a critical role in global elemental cycling and evolution of the Earth system as a whole. Our research specializes in laboratory experiments, reactive transport modeling, and field-base quantitative approaches to disentangle the highly coupled relationship between fluid transport and residence times and biogeochemical reaction rates.
As our name “CritChem” implies, our group has a primary interest in the geochemistry terrestrial systems, which comprise the most vibrant and vulnerable portion of the Earth’s surface – the Critical Zone. We develop and apply a suite of environmental tracers such as stable and radiogenic isotopes, and trace element in our approaches to better constrain there behavior and evaluate their utility as environmental, weathering, and/or source proxies.
Current areas of active research include isotope and trace element partitioning kinetics and thermodynamics during silicate mineral growth and oxidative weathering reactions, probing coupled biogeochemical cycling dynamics in temperate and tropical Critical Zones, and coupling robust isotope-enabled reactive transport models to hydrologic models for regional, basin scale groundwater hydrogeochemistry applications.
