My research focuses on studying past climate change (paleoclimate) in order to understand better what lies in our future, as greenhouse gas emissions rise. I use climate model output, statistical approaches, and paleoclimate data created here in our lab to piece together the history of Earth’s climate. My group specializes in the generation of organic geochemical records of past climate, derived from fossil molecules (called "biomarkers") preserved in sediments and rocks. Biomarkers produced by plants and microbes are particularly useful tools because environmental conditions like temperature and aridity are encoded in their molecular structure. We can calibrate these relationships using modern-day samples, and then apply these biomarker "proxies” to reconstruct climate deep into the Earth’s geologic past. We have also pioneered the use of statistical methods for reconstructing climate, developing Bayesian modeling techniques and paleoclimate data assimilation in order to generate spatially complete views of past climate and the dynamics behind it.