What I Study
Carbonate rocks — limestones and dolostones — are one of the most complete archives of ancient ocean chemistry, recording seawater temperature, redox state, and the carbon cycle across billions of years of Earth history. Corpus Christi Carbonates studies how faithfully that archive holds up: Which geochemical signals survive diagenesis intact, which are overprinted, and how to tell the difference before building a paleoceanographic interpretation on top of them.
That work spans laboratory experiments that calibrate how trace elements and isotopes partition into carbonate minerals, field-based studies of marine diagenesis, and geochemical and petrographic investigation of how burial fluids modify the rock record over geologic time. The questions are directly relevant to coastal and marine systems: Carbonate sediments and diagenetic fluids are actively forming and evolving along modern coastlines like the Texas Gulf Coast, making the Coastal Bend a natural extension of the same processes I study in the ancient rock record.
Research Areas
Experimental Proxy Calibration
Reacting carbonate minerals under controlled laboratory conditions to test how trace elements and isotopes behave during dolomitization.
Learn more →Marine Diagenesis
Testing how well geochemical proxies survive low-temperature, seawater-driven dolomitization in the rock record.
Learn more →Burial Diagenesis
Tracing how fault-controlled fluid flow drives hydrothermal dolomitization deep in sedimentary basins.
Learn more →Join the Research Group
I am recruiting graduate students through the Coastal and Marine System Science (CMSS) M.S. and Ph.D. program at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi — an interdisciplinary program that draws students from geology, chemistry, biology, oceanography, and related fields to study the coastal and marine environment as a connected system.
Students in Corpus Christi Carbonates work hands-on with experimental geochemistry, carbonate petrography, and isotope analysis, tackling questions about how carbonate rocks and sediments record, and lose, the geochemical signals of ocean chemistry. Graduate funding is available through a combination of teaching assistantships, research assistantships, and fellowships.
If you're interested in joining Corpus Christi Carbonates, get in touch directly and tell me about your background and research interests.