Arts & Sciences

I am a pollination ecologist who studies how pollination systems are affected by changing environments. At WashU, I am studying how climate change affects the time of year that plant species bloom, and how this in turn affects the ecology and evolution of plant-pollinator communities.

Other Institutional Affiliations: Living Earth Collaborative

Rebecca Dudley is a PhD student in Sociocultural Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research focuses on industrial farmers in the United States, how they interact with institutions of governance and technology, and how environments are transformed. In this research, she brings in theoretical lenses from economic and environmental anthropology, science and technology studies, and historical ecology. She is particularly interested in how climate change-related events are disrupting industrial farming processes, and how industrial agriculturalists are responding. Rebecca has extensive experience working within the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Other institutional affiliations: Agri-Food Workshop

I aim to better understand changes in the global water cycle during the past 2000 years. This will help us to understand the response of the water cycle to future global climate changes.

I'm interested in investigating genetic and phenotypic variation in wild plants with agricultural and cultural value, and broadly motivated by improving the sustainability of our food systems.

Other institutional affiliations: Dept. of Anthropology; Danforth Plant Science Center

The stable isotopes of water are critical tracers of both modern and past hydroclimate regimes. Current research activities include: measurement and interpretation of triple oxygen isotopes in modern precipitation, developing paleo-hydroclimate records using the hydrogen isotopic composition of leaf waxes, and synthesis of recent literature towards improved models of precipitation-to-leaf wax isotopic differences.

My work involves refining techniques that geochemists use to reconstruct the behavior of the global sulfur cycle, which is coupled to the carbon cycle through a series of (usually biological) reactions and supports inferences about the chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans over Earth's history. In particular, I focus on a series of rocky outcrops near St. Louis that were deposited ~450 million years ago, at a time when exceptionally high sea levels had submerged much of the North American Midcontinent (then near the Equator) in a vast, shallow sea.

Other institutional affiliations: Stable Isotope Biogeochemistry Lab.

I am interested in Quaternary paleoclimate, climate change, wildfire, remote sensing, and GIS. My research involve reconstructions of past climates and ecological properties based on multi-proxies from lakes in Alaska and Peruvian Andes.

Other institutional affiliations: Dept. of Earth and Planetary Science's Climate and Paleoclimate Laboratory.

Other institutional affiliations: Tyson Research Center; Goodman Theatre Company; Missouri Sierra Club

I study environmental archaeology in Southwest China. It is about how climate change affected the rise and fall of an archaeological settlement, or more broadly of a regional civilization.

Other institutional affiliations: Dept. of Anthropology's Geoarchaeology Lab.