LAB Members
sasha wagner
Assistant Professor, Graduate Program Director - Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Associate Director - Center for Environmental Stable Isotope Analysis
My research interests encompass organic matter biogeochemistry and how it pertains to carbon cycling in the modern Earth System and the effects of wildfire and other disturbance events on aquatic environments.
PhD Environmental Chemistry - Florida International University
BS Biochemistry - University of Delaware
Contact: wagnes3@rpi.edu
Curriculum Vitae updated July 2024
Riley Barton
PhD student
Riley graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a BS in Chemistry and Geology in May of 2020 and is continuing on as a PhD student in the Wagner Lab. Her research broadly focuses on the biogeochemical cycling of organic carbon, including black carbon, in wildfire-affected aquatic systems. She is currently investigating the immediate and legacy inputs of charred material to California rivers whose watersheds burned during the 2020 fire season.
Alex Collins
PhD student
Alex received his BS in Geology from the University of Vermont and joined our lab in 2020. His research is focused on the spatiotemporal export of organic matter in the Hudson River watershed. He is currently investigating how hydrologic events alter organic matter mobilization and whether petrogenic organic carbon persist in this river system and in oil-contaminated groundwater aquifers.
Madelyn Miller
PhD student
Maddy received her BS in Environmental Geochemical Science from SUNY New Paltz and joined our lab in 2022. Her research currently investigates the effect of recent, major wildfires on dissolved black carbon export from the Yukon River Delta in Alaska. Her efforts will help in predicting the effects of climate change on carbon cycling in vulnerable Arctic landscapes and will assist in answering broad research questions regarding the behavior of black carbon in intermediate reservoirs and fate of terrestrial organic matter in the coastal ocean.
Sebastian Barkett
PhD student
Sebastian received his BS in Biology from Baldwin Wallace University and his MS in Geology from Ohio University. His research currently focuses on the scale and synchronicity of paleo-wildfires. Specifically, he is interested in factors driving the anomalous deposition of charcoal during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). The PETM is a period in Earth’s history analogous to modern climate change as it associated with a massive release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and an increase in global temperatures.
Julia Hubbard
PhD student
Julia graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a BS in Geology in May of 2023 and is continuing on as a PhD student in the Wagner Lab. She is interested in the formation and fate of refractory organic carbon and black carbon in hydrothermal vent systems. Her research broadly investigates marine sources of ancient carbon that persists in the deep ocean.
Isabella Winston
Undergraduate researcher
Isabella joined our lab in 2022 and is working towards her BS in Environmental Science at RPI. She is currently working on a collaborative project with researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to determine how fuel type and charring conditions affect the amount and composition of dissolved black carbon leached from charcoal.
Nicole McDOnald
Undergraduate researcher
Nicole joined our lab in 2023 and is working towards her BS in Chemical Engineering at RPI. She is currently researching sources and biogeochemical processing of black carbon in marine environments, specifically in the deep ocean.
LAB ALUMNI
Ahlyia Leclerc (undergraduate researcher) - graduated 2024
Alex Bills (undergraduate researcher) - graduated 2023
Alex Goranov (postdoc) - 2021 to 2022
Evelyn Pae (undergraduate researcher) - graduated 2022
Grace Josephs (undergraduate researcher) - graduated 2022
Harrison Todd (undergraduate researcher) - graduated 2021
