Spenser Wipperfurth is a Ph.D. student in the Ocean Science and Engineering program, an interdisciplinary program organized by the Schools of Biology, Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. Simultaneously, she is pursuing her MBA from the Scheller College of Business. Spenser's research focuses on increasing coastal resiliency by quantifying and understanding the response of natural resources, namely coastal salt marshes, to compound-extreme events by developing large-scale models of target coastlines and ocean systems. Projects based on this research target the development of models and the presentation of results in formats that are most useful and helpful to the stakeholders who live and work in coastal areas. Spenser is very active in the Georgia Tech community, holding executive and leadership positions in the Graduate Student Government (VP of Academic and Research Affairs, 2022-2024), College of Science (2022-2023), Net Impact (VP of Outreach), Peer Leadership (GT6000 Leader, Committee 2023-Present), and sits on various committees and task forces for the campus-wide Climate Action Plan and Climate Conference. 

Spenser holds a BS in Civil Engineering and Spanish Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She returned to academia after her service in the Peace Corps in Peru, and work in water resources engineering in Minnesota, her home state. When not studying, Spenser can be found outside on a run, on her bike, in a lake, and with her friends. She loves Peruvian food and root beer.

Advisor: Kevin Haas

Aminat is a Ph.D. Candidate in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. Her research is focused on developing mathematical models and using high-performance computational tools to understand how glaciers and ice sheets respond to changes in climate and more broadly how the climate changes in polar regions. She is currently working on developing the first large-scale stochastic model of iceberg calving (ice fracture and detachment) to investigate uncertainty in predictions of future ice sheet change. She aims to use these new models to provide more accurate projections of future sea level rise that will help vulnerable communities develop effective adaptation strategies, mitigate the impact of rising sea levels, and foster long-term sustainable planning and engineering design. Recognizing the necessities for education and capacity-building, she is also the graduate student lead for a partnership with universities in South Africa and Nigeria to develop courses on the development of regional climate services using the best available information on varied climate impacts.

Aminat received a B.Sc. in Physics from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, and a Postgraduate Diploma in Earth System Physics from the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Italy.

Advisor: Alex Robel

Rodney Weber's research focuses on atmospheric aerosols and their impact on climate, air quality, human health, and the environment. He works on a variety of projects, including particle emissions from wildfires, particles generated from roadways, and the unique chemistry of aerosols in the Arctic. Weber develops instrumentation and novel ways to characterize aerosol particles and deploy these instruments in airborne and ground-based studies.

Christopher E. Carr is an engineer/scientist with training in aero/astro, electrical engineering, medical physics, and molecular biology. At Georgia Tech he is an Assistant Professor in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering with a secondary appointment in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. He is a member of the Space Systems Design Lab (SSDL) and runs the Planetary eXploration Lab (PXL). He serves as the Principal Investigator (PI) or Science PI for several life detection instrument and/or astrobiology/space biology projects, and is broadly interested in searching for and expanding the presence of life beyond Earth while enabling a sustainable human future. He previously served as a Research Scientist at MIT in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and a Research Fellow at the Massachusetts General Hospital in the Department of Molecular Biology. He serves as a Scott M. Johnson Fellow in the U.S. Japan Leadership Program.

Our goal is to contribute to the fundamental understanding of the Earth's biogeochemical cycling in the present and past climate, to conduct research in Ecosystem and Biogeochemistry, Ocean Carbon Cycle, Global Climate Change, and Ocean Deoxygenation using computational modeling, observations and AI/machine learning approaches. 

My primary interest is floating ice systems - Jupiter's moon Europa and Earth's ice shelves. I am interested in how these environments work and how they may become habitable. I have chosen to focus on Europa because of its potential to have what other places may not have: a stable source of energy from tides that can power geological cycles over the lifetime of the solar system. At its most basic form, life is like a battery, depending upon redox reactions to move electrons. A planetary proxy for this is activity, whereby a planet recycles through geologic processes, and maintains chemical gradients of which life can take advantage. Without recycling, it is possible that even once habitable environments can become inhospitable. This is where terrestrial process analogs come into the picture - by studying how ice and water interact in environments on Earth we can better understand the surface indications of such on Europa (and other icy worlds). My work provides a framework by which to remotely understand planetary cryospheres and test hypotheses, until such time as subsurface characterization becomes possible by radar sounding, landed seismology, or one day, roving submersibles. Much work remains to correlate observations and models of terrestrial icy environments - excellent process analogs for the icy satellites - with planetary observations. I think about how to incorporate melting, hydrofracture, hydraulic flow, and now brine infiltration as process analogs into constructing models for the formation of Europa's geologic terrain and to study the implications for ice shell recycling and ice-ocean interactions. The inclusion of realistic analogs in our backyard-Earth's poles -using imaging and geophysical techniques is a common thread of this work, giving tangible ways to generate and test hypotheses relevant to environments on Earth and Europa. In the long term, I envision constructing systems-science level models of the Europan environment to understand its habitability and enable future exploration. I'm lucky to work with a talented group of students, post docs, and collaborators who share this vision and continue to make my life's passion, understanding the worlds around us, tenable.

The Glass research group studies the microbes that made Earth habitable, and, more specifically, the microbial mechanisms underpinning cryptic transformations of methane and nitrous oxide in oxygen-free ecosystems. Why focus on the microbial world? The Earth has been constantly inhabited for four billion years. For three-quarters of that time, life was solely microbial. Ancient microbes produced the gases that warmed the planet to clement temperatures when the sun was faint, and that invented the molecular machines that drive biogeochemical cycles. The co-evolution of Earth and life is woven into the fabric of our research group, which examines the interplay between microbes and the greenhouses gases that control planetary temperature. Our research informs the microbial metabolisms that (i) made the early Earth habitable for life, (ii) make the deep subsurface habitable for life, (iii) serve as biosignatures for life on exoplanets, and (iv) play crucial roles in regulating atmospheric fluxes of greenhouse gases on our warming planet.