Isabel Fendley
I am a geochemist and I use laboratory and computational tools to study the environmental effects of volcanoes from recent volcanic eruptions to ancient large igneous provinces, the largest-scale volcanic activity on Earth.
Growing up, I loved dinosaurs and dreamed of becoming a paleontologist like I saw in the movie Jurassic Park. During my undergraduate studies at McGill University, I started volunteering at the Redpath Museum of natural history where I picked microfossils out of matrix and sorted them taxonomically. I was captured by the idea that scientists were capable of understanding and reconstructing past ecosystems and climates. As I continued, my interests shifted towards the rocks surrounding the fossils, and the geochemical signals left behind by changes in climate and environment.
My Ph.D. research at the University of California, Berkeley, and undergraduate research at McGill University both focused on the environmental changes at the Cretaceous–Paleogene mass extinction, which wiped out the dinosaurs. This period experienced significant environmental change due to the Chicxulub asteroid impact and the Deccan Traps Large Igneous Province in India.
My postdoctoral work at the University of Oxford in the UK moved back in time from the Cretaceous to the Jurassic period, when the Karoo and Ferrar Large Igneous Province eruptions resulted in global warming and the Toarcian Oceanic Anoxic Event.
My research is now focused on the intersection between volcanology and (paleo)environmental science. I use scientific understanding of modern volcanoes, particularly their emission of volcanic gases, to help us investigate how eruptions in the past influenced environmental changes such as climate change and ocean acidification.
Rachel Housego
I am from Ocoee, Florida, a small town just outside Orlando. Despite growing up on a peninsula, literally surrounded by water, I did not think about pursuing water science as a career until I participated in research as an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I spent a semester at the UNC Institute of Marine Sciences field site in Morehead City, North Carolina, where I modeled the interactions between sedimentation and oyster reefs and completed a collaborative capstone project about the influence of canal system hydrodynamics on water quality.
Being immersed in these research projects enabled me to experience how hydrodynamics can be used as a lens to understand patterns in an array of interdisciplinary topics. I also loved getting to spend time in different marine environments, from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean to salt marshes and beaches on the coast, so this experience was foundational in leading me to pursue a career in environmental research.
During my Ph.D., I studied the hydrodynamics of groundwater in a North Carolina barrier island system in response to multi-hazard (waves, tides and rain) storm events. Residents of the Outer Banks are accustomed to flooding in their communities by storms, because of the low land elevation of the barrier islands and proximity to the ocean, but they were puzzled by floods that appeared several days after a storm. These “sunny day flooding” events occur when the level where the ground is saturated with water reaches the land surface.
My research improved forecasting of these groundwater-driven flooding events and expanded the understanding of aquifer-ocean exchanges. I also worked with the town of Duck and the town of Nags Head to design a community science phone app, iFlood, to collect reports of coastal flooding on the North Carolina Outer Banks and help the towns improve coastal hazards management in their communities.
After my Ph.D., I was a postdoc at the University of Delaware where I worked on a variety of projects related to salinization of coastal freshwater resources due to ocean surges and groundwater pumping. At Penn State, I am excited to expand the scope of my research to tackle interdisciplinary groundwater research topics from the mountains to the coasts and build new community-based research partnerships