Christian is a third year undergraduate with a joint Math/Atmospheric and Oceanic Science major at UCLA. He is part of a research team looking at climate change impacts on Antarctica.
Deepshikha Upadhyay
Deep is a graduate student here at UCLA, studying geochemistry. Her research studies the connection between hominin evolution, climate, and landscape changes within East Africa using geochemistry. She collaborates with several independent researchers on both a national and international level and is part of the Hominin Sites Paleolakes Drilling Project.
Her other interests lie in painting, reading fiction, mooching off of her brother’s Steam account for his RPGs, botany, and generally spending any amount of time in nature. She is also a devoted fan of Stephen King’s “Dark Tower” series, and is always in the mood to sit around a campfire telling scary stories.
Justin Voon
Justin is a third-year geophysics major who is doing research as part of an student team on the consequences of greenhouse gas emissions on temperatures in ocean waters surrounding Antarctica. He also is studying geological archives of past tropical climate change. Justin also enjoys cycling downhill!
Priya Ganguli
Professor Priya Ganguli is an incoming Assistant Professor at California State University Northridge. Her appointment is affiliated with the Water Resources Center and is in the Department of Geological Sciences. Professor Ganguli’s research interests include aqueous geochemistry, contaminant cycling, groundwater-surface water interaction, food web dynamics, watershed dynamics, and climate change. In addition to research, she loves teaching, and taught at Saddleback Community College.
Professor Ganguli was awarded a NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship at UC Irvine and UC Santa Cruz to study the transport and fate of mercury in the environment. She also held a postdoctoral fellowship at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution where she explored climate change impacts on mercury cycling in salt marsh systems in collaboration with the US Geological Survey. She also gained valuable experience working as a geologist at the San Francisco Bay Water Board where she was involved in large-scale mine site and wetland remediation projects, as well as groundwater cleanup at industrial sites (e.g., refineries, landfills).
Kristina Nicholas
Kristina recently graduated from UCLA with a degree in Earth and Environmental Science. Her interests include playing tennis, guitar, and hiking. Kristina aspires to pursue a career in environmental consulting and attend graduate school.
Greg Jesmok
Greg is a singer that plays soccer and likes long walks on the beach, over mountains, in valleys (pretty much anywhere). His primary geologic interests include sedimentary petrology, geomorphology, tectonics, remote sensing, and stable isotope geochemistry. Greg has also just graduated from UCLA! Currently he is working on tracer development and on studying environmental change in northeastern Tibet, to constrain paleotemperatures and paleoaltimetry within the region. He also is active in outreach. Greg aspires to one day give back more than he takes from the world, via helping those who are overlooked and underappreciated but equally talented and highly capable.
Nathan Davila
Nathan Davila is a fourth year Earth and Environmental Science major with a goal to make a positive difference in this world. Climate change and California’s water resources are the major environmental issues he wishes to address in his career to come. However, that is not his only focus. Becoming a father and spreading love and music to his family and community beyond is a passion that truly evolves with Nathan as we all make our way through life… he also shares a birthday with Paul McCartney.
Chloe Whicker
Chloe is a second year undergraduate researcher working on the Western United States Hydrology and Paleohydrology Project. She grew up in the greater Los Angeles area, and is studying environmental science with a concentration in atmospheric and oceanic sciences at UCLA. She is an undergraduate CARE research fellow. In her free time, Chloe enjoys running, hiking, and cooking.
One of Chloe’s long term goals is to continue her participation in climate science research. She recently worked on the the Western United States Paleohydrology Project using paleoclimate observations derived from clumped isotope geochemistry to evaluate climate models with an overall goal of reducing the uncertainty in climate model predictions. She is analyzing carbonate samples from Mono Basin, Owens Lake, Panamint Valley, and Surprise Valley to quantify how and why the climate has warmed since the Last Glacial Maximum, and to examine the impacts on the water cycle.
Jimmy Lee
Jimmy Lee is a third year neuroscience major and geology minor. Jimmy is doing research on climate change impacts on the tropical oceans and polar oceans using novel chemical tracers. He is interested in surface geology, as well as neural mechanisms for cognition and memory. Jimmy likes cooking, tea, hi-fi audio, and East Asian history/culture.
Alexandrea Arnold
Alexandrea Arnold (she/her) received her Ph.D. degree from the department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, where she was a graduate fellow of CDLS and was awarded a Eugene V. Cota-Robles fellowship. Prior to starting graduate school, she received her Bachelor’s degree from UCLA, double majoring in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and Earth and Environmental Sciences. Her Ph.D. research investigates how the atmospheric dynamics that governed hydroclimate (temperature, evaporation, precipitation) evolved in the southwestern United States since the Last Glacial Maximum, roughly 20,000 years ago, by using geochemical proxies in concert with modeling to see if climate models are capturing the trends that are observed in the geologic record.
Alex is committed to improving both academic and environmental climates. She was awarded the UC President’s Award for Outstanding Student Leadership for her work creating student-led outreach program Environmental Justice and First Nations, which promotes the recruitment and retention of Indigenous students in STEM. Alex is also a co-founder of Society of Women Geoscientists at UCLA, a community created to help make the geosciences a more diverse and inclusive space, and has been the outreach chair of the Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences department for the last three years. In the spring of 2020, Alex was awarded the UCLA Academic Senate Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Graduate Student Award for her leadership, mentorship, and outreach.