New Faculty

I am very excited to return to the UB Geology Department as a clinical professor this year and teach a whole new crop of students. While my teaching responsibilities (and children) keep me busy I am working to incorporate opportunities for student-led research into my courses. My research interests include pushing the limits on how precise biostratigraphy can be and leveraging that precision to understand extinction patterns in the fossil record. I’m also interested in sampling and studying the local rock record of placoderms, extinct armored fish.

I am a biogeochemist who follows the movement of carbon, nitrogen and other elements through soils and the streams that drain them. I am particularly interested in mechanisms of soil organic matter stabilization, mineral-organic associations, redox-sensitive processes, and hydrologically-integrated biogeochemical understanding. Using tools from ecology, hydrology and geochemistry, I examine these topics on scales ranging from the soil profile to large river basins. My first love is forests, but I am broadly interested in human-impacted ecosystems.

I am a plant ecologist whose research focuses on understanding the consequences of climate change and disturbances on ecological processes. I use data syntheses, manipulative experiments, and observational studies to examine how the responses of ecosystem carbon and nitrogen processes to environmental stress are mediated by the responses of plant ecophysiology and plant-soil interactions. I am excited to join the diverse community of biologists, ecologists, and geologists in Buffalo next fall, and look forward to meeting people in person!

I am very excited to join UB Geology as an assistant professor in fall 2020 and contribute an experimental component to the vibrant research environment in volcanology and geohazards. My research interests lie in understanding physical processes in the fields of volcanology, natural-hazards, igneous petrology and geo-materials science. I strive to answer questions posed by field relations via a combined approach of experimental studies and systematic geo-material characterization. I enjoy combining experimental geosciences with applied field and remote sensing studies to generate holistic data sets on the co-evolution of magma and lava petrology, their physical properties as well as the rock mechanics of volcanoes. This allows us to deduce the processes guiding physical properties and to constrain the timescales of their evolution; both crucial parameters to the accurate assessment of the related risk and hazard.

I am excited to join UB and be a part of the Department of Geology. I am an assistant professor and will move to Buffalo in fall 2020. I am an applied mathematician and a volcanologist with more than 10 years of research experience working for the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV). I focus on the mathematical modeling of geological processes. This includes development and application of reliable and efficient models which describe volcanic flows, multiphase flows of many types (from magma ascent in volcanic conduits to plumes and tephra transport, volcanogenic tsunamis, lahars), landscape evolution and geophysical problems in general, on earth and other planetary bodies. In 2010 he was awarded a Marie Curie IOF for the project “Magma Ascent Mathematical Modelling and Analysis” and in 2015 the Wager Medal for my contribution to the study of physical volcanology.