Dr. Maria Tzortziou
Associate Professor
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Dr. Tzortziou's research integrates multidisciplinary datasets, satellite remote sensing observations, and ecosystem models to provide mechanistic insights into the impacts of human and environmental pressures on biogeochemical cycles and ecological processes along the continuum of terrestrial, wetland, estuarine, and open ocean ecosystems. Her research has taken her from the Gulf of Mexico and the Chesapeake Bay wetlands to the Tanana Valley in Alaska and the Arctic coastal ocean, from urbanized coastlines in the Mediterranean and Europe's trans-boundary watersheds to the Asian coastal megacities of Seoul and Busan, to the Hindu-Kush Himalayan river basins. Dr. Tzortziou is the Applied Sciences Program Lead Coordinator for NASA satellite missions PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem), GEO-CAPE (GEOstationary for Coastal and Air Pollution Events), and ACE (Aerosol, Clouds, Ecosystems).
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Dr. Elizabeth Corbett
Postdoctoral Research Associate
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Dr. Corbett joined the Tzortziou lab in 2016 after completing a NASA postdoctoral fellowship with Columbia University Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory and NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Dr. Corbett is a biogeochemist and her research interests focus on carbon cycling in urban wetlands, specifically looking at the quantity and stable isotope signatures of greenhouse gases (CO2 and CH4) dissolved in marsh porewater and emitted to the atmosphere, and the quality of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) within the marsh pore water. Using pore water samples from sites dominated by distinct vegetation such as invasive Phragmites austraulis and native vegetation species (Spartina patens, Scirpus, Typha angustifolia, and Eleocharis), Dr. Corbett is interested in examining how marsh porewater chemistry, vegetation characteristics, density and depth of live plant roots affect respiration pathways, carbon storage, and the quality of carbon exported from urban wetlands.
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Dr. Fang Cao
Postdoctoral Research Associate
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Dr. Cao joined the lab in 2015 after completing her Ph.D. in Marine Sciences at the University of Georgia. Dr. Cao has an expertise on chemical and optical oceanography with an emphasis on understanding ultraviolet (UV) dependent photoprocesses of dissolved organic matter (DOM) using satellite ocean color measurements. Her current work includes developing ocean color algorithms to retrieve bio-optical parameters, evaluating UV photochemistry of DOM in optically complex waters, and characterizing sources, transformation, and cycling pathways of DOM using its optical properties (e.g., absorption, fluorescence). Her research focuses on improving our understanding of biogeochemical processes in the ocean, especially processes that transform and/or remove dissolved organic carbon and photoproduction of trace gases (carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide).
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Dr. Guoqing Wang
Postdoctoral Research Associate
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Dr. Wang joined the lab in 2018 after completing her Ph.D. in Marine Sciences at the Optical Oceanography Lab at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her expertise is in the areas of bio-optical oceanography, ocean color, and remote sensing retrievals of phytoplankton pigments using satellite multi- and hyper- spectral imagery. Dr. Wang is currently involved in a number of projects focusing on assessing carbon and phytoplankton dynamics across different coastal environments, including the coastal Arctic, Southeast Asia, and Long Island Sound waters, and assessing impacts of human activities and environmental stressors on coastal ecological processes, development of hypoxic conditions, occurrence of bloom outbreaks, and change in fisheries habitat.
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Brian Lamb
PhD Graduate student, NASA Fellow
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Brian's research focuses on freshwater and coastal ecology. Brian earned a BS in Natural Sciences from Cornell University. His MSc thesis research included using datasets obtained via microwave remote sensing to develop hydrologic climate indicators at the river basin scale as part of NASA's role in the National Climate Assessment. Brian is currently engaged in NASA funded research using active microwave and passive optical remote sensing to map wetland vegetation communities and inundation regimes in the Chesapeake Bay. Brian is particularly interested in augmenting observations obtained via microwave remote sensing with optical remote sensing to study processes at the wetland-estuary interface.
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Alana Menendez
PhD Graduate student, Bernard Levine PhD. Fellow
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Alana joined the lab in 2015 after completing her B.A. on Earth and Oceanographic Science at Bowdoin College. She is a Doherty Coastal Studies Fellow (2013), a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Fellow (2012), a NASA GISS Fellow (2016), and a Bernard Levine PhD Fellow (2017). Her general interests include land-water interactions relating to biogeochemical cycling and nutrients, relationships between nutrient availability and phytoplankton concentration and taxonomy, atmosphere-ocean carbon fluxes, climate change and changing marine biogeochemistry.
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Owen Parker
MSc Graduate student, NOAA CREST Fellow
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Owen joined the Tzortziou lab in 2016, after studying and conducting research at Cornell University and the City University of New York. His research interests include environmental chemistry, air quality, microbial ecology, bioinformatics, and remote sensing. His graduate work focuses on measurements of atmospheric variability in coastal areas using various in-situ and remote sensing sensors. One of his main objectives is assessing spatial and temporal (diurnal and seasonal) dynamics in atmospheric traces gases (NO2 and O3) over estuarine and coastal waters, as well as across the land-ocean interface. Owen is a NOAA CREST Fellow collaborating with the NOAA's Air Resources Laboratory.
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Corey Scher
MSc Graduate student
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Corey joined the lab in 2017 after completing his B.A. degree in Geology at Berkeley. His undergraduate work included extraction of detailed channel bathymetry and floodplain topography from LiDAR imagery to test hypotheses about controls on river channel geometry. He also worked with the Geospatial Analysis Lab (GsAL) in the Department of Environmental Science at the University of San Francisco on remote monitoring of groundwater overdraft using GRACE and InSAR. His graduate work involves applications of high spatial resolution satellite imagery to retrievals of carbon stocks and fluxes in coastal ecosystems.
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Jake Supino
MSc Graduate student
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Jake joined the lab in 2018 after getting his BA in Environmental Studies, with minors in Environmental Biology and Business, from New York University. His research interests include biogeochemical cycling in coastal ecosystems, their relationships to primary producer distributions in wetlands and the open ocean, wetland sustainability with regard to changing climates, and how these drivers impact the global marine food web.
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PhD Committee Advisees
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2014 - now: Blake Clark (MSc, PhD in Environmental Science) - Main Advisor: Raleigh Hood. The University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.
2014 - 2017: Robert Foster (PhD in Environmental Engineering) - Main Advisor: Alexander Gilerson, City College of New York, Grove School of Engineering. |