I'm Dr. John Gunnell, a postdoctoral fellow at the Northeastern University Marine Science Center working under Dr. Justin B. Ries working on various projects regarding marine calcifiers. The common thread across my research is the geologic processes of the Anthropocene, considering the effects of the recent past and near future of human behavior, and how they manifest themselves in the earth system. I studied for my B.S. at the University of Michigan, working in Professor John Lehman's limnology laboratory. Then, I moved on to University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to earn my M.S. under Dr. Brent McKee, using radiotracers to reconstruct sedimentation rates in an incipient salt marsh. For my Ph.D., I continued to work under Dr. McKee, studying the transport and deposition of recent sediments.

Current Projects

• Developing a multi-elemental palaeothermometer using trace elemental profiles of coral skeletons
• Reconstructing a multidecadal temperature history for the Meso-American Barrier Reef System
• Developing methods for the quantitative image analysis of tissue and shell morphologies

Publications

Gunnell, J.R., Rodriguez, A.B., McKee, B.A., “How a Marsh is Built from the Bottom Up”, Geology 41(8) p.859-862

Greiner, J.T., McGlathery, K.J., Gunnell, J.R., McKee, B.A., “Seagrass Restoration Enhances ‘Blue Carbon’ Sequestration in Coastal Waters”, PLoS ONE 8(8)