Christopher Blaszczak-Boxe
Blaszczak-Boxe recently joined the department as an associate research professor.
I am a lifelong educator who uses numerical-modeling platforms to assess the evolution of planets on various timescales. On the experimental front, I participate in field and laboratory studies that assess the abundance of potentially toxic substances in indoor and outdoor environments and their potential impacts on human health. At Penn State, I hope my contributions to science will span both solar and extrasolar system habitable planets and will also encompass quantifying how environmental toxins contribute to select adverse health impacts. I also plan to implement STEM-education initiatives to help increase, retain, and inevitably steer students toward science and engineering careers and disciplines.
I earned a B.S. in chemistry and a minor in math from Morehouse College in 1999 and later completed a Ph.D. in environmental science and engineering at the California Institute of Technology in 2005, along with a minor in geology, an M.S. in environmental science and engineering and an M.S. in planetary science. Since graduating, I have worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the City University of New York, and various high schools within the borough of Brooklyn.
Miquela Ingalls
Miquela Ingalls recently joined the department as an assistant professor.
Growing up in North Carolina, I spent my childhood rock hopping and creating mental maps of the creeks and hills in the neighboring woods. However, I was unaware that I could make a career out of investigating land surfaces and their environments until my first semester of college. Becoming involved in undergraduate research in the Radiogenic Isotopes lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was the best decision my 18-year-old self could have made. I was fortunate enough to spend multiple summers in Yosemite studying the impact of rock fall and rock slide events on the shape of the valley floor, and the timing of the emplacement of the El Capitan granite—the iconic monolith that greets visitors to Yosemite Valley.
Following graduation with my undergraduate degree in geology, I worked for the United State Geological Survey in Bozeman, Montana, tagging fish to track how the native and invasive populations adapted to human-imposed changes in the drainage structure of the Snake River. I had no idea at the time how geology and biology—seemingly operating on vastly different time scales—could so greatly influence each other, and how important this idea would be to my later work.
For my graduate studies at the University of Chicago, I used terrestrial carbonate sediments from Paleocene-Eocene lake and soil deposits to reconstruct the timing of the uplift of the Tibetan Plateau. The carbonate-based proxy for elevation relies on carbonate minerals faithfully recording the oxygen isotope composition of ancient rainwater, which changes with altitude. However, I learned that lacustrine carbonate can record layered chemical fingerprints of local hydrology, biology, and climate.
Brian Kelley
Brian Kelley recently joined the department as an assistant professor.
I grew up in northeastern Ohio on the edge of woodlands that were crossed by streams and dotted with small lakes. These natural areas became the setting for childhood adventures of curiosity and exploration. Summer vacations were spent on the beaches of North Carolina, where I developed a lasting fascination with the ocean.
Following high school, few of my childhood friends attended college, so I initially followed suit and went to work. Years later, I returned to the classroom as a non-traditional student. An early course in oceanography led to a degree in geology and ultimately to a Ph.D. at Stanford University. During my graduate field work in carbonate sedimentology and stratigraphy, I spent six months in southern China surrounded by limestone mountains in a dramatic karst landscape.
After earning my graduate degree, I worked for ExxonMobil in Houston, where I studied some of the largest carbonate reservoirs in the world. My work took me to Spain, Kazakhstan, Alaska, the Middle East, and the Bahamas. I developed an understanding for the challenge of meeting the energy demands of a growing world population while mitigating climate change, protecting the environment, and preserving biodiversity. This is the fundamental problem that current and future generations of scientists must help to solve.
I could be classified as a sedimentologist, a marine geologist, or a paleobiologist, but I think of myself more generally as an Earth scientist. I am broadly interested in the co-evolution of Earth environment and its inhabitants, in both the modern and ancient, across timescales that range from decades to millions of years.
My ongoing research uses coral reefs and other carbonate sediments to investigate Earth-system evolution. Reefs have excellent fossil and stratigraphic records, but they are also ecologically fragile. Like a canary in a coal mine, they can be an important indicator of marine ecosystem health. I am currently investigating the causes and consequences of environmental disturbance in early Mesozoic oceans that contributed to end-Paleozoic extinction and the global absence of coral reefs for millions of years. The parallels to the modern ocean and the effects of anthropogenic climate change are both striking and alarming. I am grateful for the opportunity to join the Department of Geosciences at Penn State. I was drawn here by the people. The students, faculty, and administrative staff have created a culture of collegiality, curiosity, and exploration that I am proud to be a part of.
Kimberly Lau
Kimberly Lau recently joined the department as an assistant professor.
Growing up in California’s Bay Area with parents who loved visiting natural history museums and camping in the nearby state and national parks, I was inspired to wonder how our Earth and its diverse landscapes and inhabitants had transformed into the way they are today. As an undergraduate student at Yale University, I knew I was interested in the environment and evolutionary history but had only vague ideas about how one could study these topics. After all, the naturalists I read about at those natural history museums and park visitor centers—John Muir, Charles Darwin, and so on—seemed to have jobs that didn’t quite exist in the modern world.
Taking a History of Life course at Yale changed my misconception of what the field of geology encompasses. Studying the earth sciences connects the notion of environments and biology evolving in parallel and invites a new dimension of thinking by broadening how time and space are considered. For my senior thesis, I studied the distribution and diversity of New York’s state fossil, the eurypterid.
A postdoc saw my final presentation and asked if I had considered doing some isotope measurements to determine the environmental conditions where the molted eurypterid carapaces were deposited. I hadn’t, but filed away that tidbit while I worked as an environmental consultant in the Boston area.
After several years of working, I was ready to consider graduate school, and I decided that I wanted to use geochemistry to provide context to evolutionary patterns in the fossil record. With this in mind, I started a Ph.D. at Stanford University, where I studied how carbonate isotope proxies can inform us of how the degree of scarcity and instability of oxygen in the oceans correspond to periods of animal extinction and evolution. I continued to investigate these paleoenvironmental proxies during my postdoc at UC Riverside and then at the University of Wyoming.
Max Lloyd
Max Lloyd recently joined Penn State as an assistant research professor in geosciences.
I am a low-temperature geochemist who uses measurements and models to study how molecules record their own histories, and what such records can teach us about Earth surface and near-surface processes in the present and past. I’m looking forward to integrating my skillset—position-specific and multiply-substituted isotope geochemistry, biogeochemistry, and gas-source mass spectrometry—into a department that is renowned in these and related fields. Together, I expect we’ll make significant advances while training the next generation of world-class geochemists.
Raised by a tech worker and a food writer in Silicon Valley, California, I met C++ before cursive and my first exposure to the scientific method happened in the kitchen; early investigations into the time-temperature path that yields the perfect soft-boiled egg led to an interest in cooking, experiment, and cooking experiments, that persists today.
I earned my undergraduate degree at Amherst College in central Massachusetts, where I was first exposed to seasons—fall lives up to the hype—and the geosciences. I majored in geology due to an enthusiasm for how principles from chemistry and physics could explain key features of the observable world, such as the location of deserts and the makeup of the atmosphere. Following an influential summer undergraduate research fellowship at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, I chose to pursue a Ph.D. and career in geochemistry due to an interest in discovering new tools with which we can study past versions of Earth that are not directly observable.
I received my Ph.D. in geochemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 2018. My graduate work took me into the field in western Utah and the eastern Swiss Alps, and into the lab, where I paired classic chemical derivatization techniques with the latest generation of gas-inlet isotope ratio mass spectrometers. I leveraged these pairings in my dissertation to study the transformations that occur at an intra-molecular level in two forms of carbon—carbonate minerals and kerogen—in the shallow crust. Such intramolecular isotopic transformations allowed us to distinguish, for example, carbonate strata that have been buried two vs. three kilometers deep and subsurface coal beds that have been degraded by microbes versus by heat and time alone.
I spent the last two years as an Agouron Geobiology Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley where I used a technique developed during my Ph.D. and applied it in a new direction; to understand how the dynamics of photosynthesis in trees are recorded in the wood they produce. The fossil wood archive extends back to the Mesozoic, so this ongoing work has the potential to provide insights into how plants responded, on a metabolic level, to some of the key changes in Earth’s climate state. On a personal level, this work has expanded my research directions to include not just the outcrop but also the biota that overgrows it.
Having just moved to State College, I am enjoying living in a gorgeous place with sufficient water for plants and people alike, and cooking with the delicious produce grown nearby. In my free time, expect to find me exploring the surrounding trails by foot or bike. I am looking forward to teaching and advising the department’s students this fall, in whatever form virtual or
in-person our interactions take place.