People
Principal Investigator
Dr. Emmy Smith
Emmy is a field geologist and sedimentologist interested in the co-evolution of life, climate, oceans, and tectonics during the Neoproterozoic and Cambrian. Her research integrates geological mapping, regional stratigraphy, sedimentology, paleontology, isotope geochemistry, and geochronology in field sites that include Central Asia, the southwest USA, Mexico, southern Africa, and Central Asia to test hypotheses about mechanistic links between environmental change and evolutionary milestones.
Email: efsmith[at]jhu[dot]edu
Lab Manager
Dr. Dana Brenner
Dana is a research scientist with both geology and general environmental science interests. Her research focuses on understanding chemical and geochemical processes in the environment. She use a combination of laboratory experimentation, fieldwork, and computational modeling to connect micro-scale reactions to macro-scale natural processes. Her research projects range from evaluating metamorphic thermal signatures with carbonate clumped isotopes to quantifying watershed scale denitrification.
Dana works in the stable isotope mass spec facility which is shared between Dr. Smith and Dr. Maya Gomes.
Email: danabrenner[at]jhu[dot]edu
Postdoctoral Fellows
Dr. Cecilia Sanders
Dr. Cecilia Sanders, a Morton K. Blaustein Postdoctoral Fellow, is a geobiologist interested in the origins and evolution of life on Earth and beyond, studying how the record of ancient life is preserved in rocks. Currently her research is focused on sedimentary phosphate deposits, which can preserve microbial and animal body fossils alongside the elemental and isotopic signatures of their metabolic strategies and environmental context. Such deposits are abundant near the Precambrian-Cambrian boundary around the world but vary in the style and taphonomic potential of phosphate mineralization. Dr. Sanders collects sedimentological and stratigraphic data from these deposits in situ, most recently in Eastern Brazil and Western Mongolia, and subjects samples thereof to spatially-resolved elemental and isotopic analyses — e.g., optical microscopy, Raman spectroscopy, X-Ray fluorescence spectroscopy (XRF), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS), as well mass spectrometry of stable isotopes of sulfur, oxygen, and carbon. Dr. Sanders is also an artist and science illustrator, working to develop teaching materials for science education at all levels.
Email: csande37[at]jhu[dot]edu
Dr. Kelsey Moore
Kelsey is a geobiologist with a deep love of microbes and a curiosity about microbial life on early Earth. Her research centers around the preservation of biosignatures and what taphonomy can tell us about how microbes interact with the chemical environment. This includes both the impacts that microbes had on their environment and, in parallel, the impacts that environmental conditions have on microbes, their evolution, and their preservation in the rock record. She uses a range of experimental and analytical techniques that combine modern microbes and ancient fossils. With these tools, she addresses questions related to the evolution of the biosphere on Earth, chemical conditions in ancient environments, and the preservation of organic matter and fossils.
Email: kmoor101@jhu.edu
Ph.D. Students
Mary Lonsdale
Mary is an E&PS PhD candidate interested in reconstructing paleoenvironments surrounding extreme events, particularly during the Neoproterozoic and Cambrian.
Email: mlonsdale[at]jhu[dot]edu
Iona Baillie
Iona is an EP&S PhD student interested in using sedimentology and geochemistry to investigate topics related to Ediacaran and Cambrian Earth History and paleoenvironment.
email: ibailli1[at]jhu[dot]edu
Bjorn Springer
Bjorn is a PhD student in E&PS working on the Neoproterozoic rifting of Rodinia.
email: bspring3[at]jhu[dot]edu
Kabir Mohammed
Kabir is a PhD student in E&PS working primarily with Dr. Maya Gomes. His current research interests are in the evolution of metabolism and the coevolution of life and environment. He is doing a minor PhD project on Neoproterozoic microfossils that is co-supervised by Dr. Emmy Smith and Dr. Kelsey Moore. He has previously worked in animal magnetoreception and microbial metabolism.
email: kmohamm6[at]jhu[dot]edu
Undergraduate students
AJ Winegar (2023- )
High School Students
Aydin Mokaddem, Class of 2023
Kei Leigh Mese-Jones, Class of 2024
These are high school students at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute who are part of the Baltimore Ingenuity Project Research Practicum Program.
Lab Alumni
Postdoc Fellows
Dr. Athena Eyster (2021-2022); now faculty at Tufts University
Graduate students
Dr. Lyle Nelson (PhD student; 2018-2022); now faculty at Carleton University
Undergraduates and post-bacs
Rachel Miller (undergraduate researcher 2021-2023); now PhD student at Purdue
Val Aguilar (lab tech 2021-2022); now PhD student at Harvard
Lucy Webb (undergraduate researcher, 2018-2020; lab tech 2020-2021); now PhD student at Stanford
Nicole Stevens (undergraduate researcher, 2018-2020); now PhD student at Texas A&M
Eleni Daskopoulou (undergraduate researcher 2021)
Amelia Lindsay-Kaufman (research assistant 2017-2018); now PhD student at University of Maryland
High school students from the Ingenuity Project
Kei Leigh Mese-Jones (2022-2023)
Kaif Rehman (2021-2022); now studying geosciences at University of Texas
Mia Schildbach (2020-2021)
Jacob Thompson (2019-2021)
Ari Harris-Kupfer (2018-2019)