Spectrochemical Characterization of Diverse Ecosystem Dynamics

Understanding the complex relationship between ecosystems and how they respond to different environmental stressors is a grand challenge within chemical sensing and ecosystem ecology. I am specifically interested in how metabolomic, elemental, and spectral profiles change during various stress events such as drought, contamination, etc. for use as a biomonitoring tool, utilizing plants and their rhizosphere microbes. The goal of my research is to understand the how plants, microbes, and surrounding soils can be used as chemical sensor to better detect and classify stressors and chemicals of interest.