Our team

Alex is a biogeochemist with a background in organic geochemistry and microbiology. He studies how life and Earth have changed together over four billion years, using molecular fossils, stable isotopes, remote sensing, and fieldwork. He also directs the Fossett Laboratory.

Alex keeps the lab running. She has a Master’s in physics from Brigham Young University, where she worked on space instrumentation and materials science, and she brings that experimental rigor to everything from thin-film SIMS standards to microbial growth experiments.

Maggie came to WashU through the Joint Post-Baccalaureate Program after studying Physics & Astronomy at the University of Tennessee. She’s interested in how ideas from information theory can help us understand the origin and ambiguity of molecular biomarkers — essentially, how much can a single fossilized molecule really tell us about the organism that made it?

Jenny joined the lab through WashU’s Joint Post-Baccalaureate Program and is now pursuing her Master’s. She studied Earth System Science and Data Science at Framingham State, and before coming to WashU she worked on plankton size distributions from satellite data at Princeton and on carbonate geochemistry with Kristin Bergmann at MIT. She’s interested in paleoclimatology, organic geochemistry, and biogeochemistry.