Outreach Projects

The Marine City 

In the Fall of 2021, while I was the acting director of the NYC hub for the Sustainable Ocean Alliance (SOA NYC), the hub was granted a micro-grant for our project called 'The Marine City'. The project was aimed at increasing community engagement with the marine environment through a series of community based activities, namely shoreline cleanups, a public art show, and a web seminar on green media (all activities were free and open to all to attend). 

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The culmination of the project was the Marine City Art show, co organized by the founder of the Green Point Art Circle (GPAC) Nadya Gomez and GPAC members. The art show ran out of The Church of the Ascension in Greenpoint, Brooklyn from March 12th through April 3rd of 2022. The work included in The Marine City explored the rich and storied relationship between New York City and its surrounding marine environment, from personal perspectives and impressions to historical and community matters, which include the effects of climate change. These visual works brought together a kaleidoscope of visions from artists that are inspired by the magnificence of our city’s waters and shorelands. Opening night saw 200+ attendees engage with the art work and with the topic of how to better appreciate and protect the city's marine environment. 

Interdisciplinary Work

For paleoclimatologists, natural earth materials—from ice cores to plankton shells and coral skeletons—are archives of prehistoric environmental conditions. From these materials, the field works to reconstruct the Earth’s past to shed light on its present and future given natural and anthropogenically driven climate change.

Coral have existed for approximately 541 million years, and their presence in the fossil record makes them a unique archive of planetary conditions since the diversification of complex life. Modern Scleractinia coral exhibited high biodiversity when they entered the fossil record approximately 237 Mya in the aftermath of the Permian-Triassic extinction, which wiped out previous taxonomic orders of coral. Modern Scleractinia create skeletons of aragonite (a metastable polymorph of calcium carbonate) using dissolved inorganic carbon and other ions from ambient seawater.  This process is assumed to be a modern analog to ancient coral calcification. For this reason, coral are archives of seawater chemistry and, in turn, the climate through geologic time. 

Coral have also inspired the imagination of people throughout human history. There are significant collections of coral specimens in art museums, fashion archives, and private collections. The way coral have been viewed as objects to archive (or as archives themselves) depends on the collector’s epistemological approach. 

This project will bridge scientific and cultural perspectives on coral as archives: (i) as an archive of seawater chemistry and climate conditions; (ii) as a historically significant object across cultures; and (iii) as a subject depicted in art and fashion throughout human history. It will also investigate how coral are incorporated into collections spanning natural history institutions to art museums, while considering how climate change threatens modern coral as well as the institutional spaces where coral are kept, potentially causing the disappearance of an irreplaceable archive of various types of knowledge.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

The picture shown above is of a very excited me in the Rotunda of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History during the closing celebration for the second national AGU Chapman conference for Justice in the Geosciences. 

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In my work and my personal life, I am committed to the principles of promoting diverse, equitable, and inclusive spaces for all people to voice their opinions and have those voices be heard. I want these to lead to improvements in the material reality in the lives (both professional and personal) of my colleagues in the Geosciences and the Academy more broadly. This reality, I believe, includes but is not limited to: 

- Fair and transparent hiring practices that lead to diverse department faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates admitted in to the academy

- Support for minority members of the academy in ways that fit the needs of those members (e.g., monetary support for conference travel including food and housing stipends) 

- Suitable child care and parental leave 

- Equal pay between genders 

- Transparent tenure requirement packages 

- An end to the policies that equate tenure with impunity 

- Fair accountability of all members of the academic community 

- Compulsory annual training on compassionate teaching and mentoring practices 

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I believe that the earth sciences has a long way to go before achieving any of these goals I have laid out but I am committed to helping the field advance so that more earth scientists are welcomed into the field for long and happy careers that lead to awesome scientific questions being explored.