Team
Postdoctoral scholars
Hussein Sayani, Ph.D.
Hussein received a PhD in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2017. He joined the Tropical Climate and Coral Reefs Lab as a Postdoctoral Researcher in Fall 2017.
Hussein’s research focuses on understanding natural climate variability in the tropics, in order to improve projections of future climate change. At Georgia Tech, Hussein specialized in using chemical tracers found within coral skeletons to develop records of past in ocean temperature and salinity changes across recent centuries to millennia. These records are used to investigate mechanisms of past climate change, and provide the context needed to quantify human-driven climate trends in the region. At Boston University, Hussein will work on developing and refining a new coral-based wind proxy. Recent observations suggest that decadal trends in global surface warming are tied to natural climate variability in the tropical Pacific, specifically changes in the strength of the trade-winds. However, both temperature and wind observations from this region are extremely limited prior to 1970, making it difficult to characterize the relationship between Pacific trade-winds and global temperature trends. Using this new coral-wind proxy, Hussein will work with the Tropical Climate and Coral Reefs Lab to develop the first, well-replicated reconstruction of Pacific trade-wind variability using coral samples from multiple islands in the equatorial Pacific.
Twitter: @HSayani
Graduate Students
Emma Reed, M.S.
Emma Reed graduated from Cornell University in 2014 with majors in Science of Earth Systems and English, and a minor in Marine Biology. She received her M.S. in Geosciences from the University of Arizona in 2016. Alongside collaborators at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, Emma used coral cores to reconstruct histories of climate and coral growth in the northern Great Barrier Reef. While in Arizona, she worked at Biosphere 2 to expand its marine science curriculum for middle- and high-school students. Emma joined the Tropical Climate & Coral Reefs Lab in summer 2016. With the help of an NSF Graduate Fellowship, she is working to develop the first paleoclimate and coral growth records from the Marshall Islands. Such records from this understudied region could improve our understanding of Pacific climate variability on seasonal to multi-decadal time scales.
Twitter: @e_v_reed
Undergraduate Students
Juliette Bateman
Rachel Jiang