Laboratory Manager/Administrator: Lori Reck

Elsie M. Sunderland is the Gordon McKay Professor Environmental Chemistry at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and in the Department of Environmental Health in the Harvard School of Public Health, and an affiliated faculty member of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.  She is a Faculty Associate in the Harvard University Center for the Environment and the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis. 

Research in the Sunderland Lab focuses on how biogeochemical processes affect the fate, transport and food web bioaccumulation of trace metals and organic chemicals. Her group develops and applies models at a variety of scales ranging from ecosystems and ocean basins (e.g., the Gulf of Maine, the North Pacific and Arctic Oceans) to global applications to characterize how changes in climate and emissions affect human and ecological health, and the potential impacts of regulatory activities. Her group also makes key measurements of chemical concentrations and reaction rates in environmental samples (natural waters, sediments, and aquatic biota) and humans (hair, blood) to parameterize and evaluate environmental models.

Ongoing research is elucidating the biogeochemical cycling of compounds with contrasting physical and chemical properties that can be used to obtain insights into the varying exposure pathways and environmental lifetimes for industrial chemicals. The innovation in this work is to quantitatively analyze the entire exposure pathway for these compounds to identify their properties in air and water (e.g., stability in the atmosphere, photodegradation in water, environmental partitioning behavior) that enhance chemical persistence and ultimate accumulation in biota.

Assistant: Brenda Mathieu

DR. JOHN P. HOLDREN is the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy at the Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, CoDirector of the School’s Science, Technology, and Public Policy program, Professor of Environmental Science and Policy in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, and Faculty Affiliate in the Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Science. He is also Visiting Distinguished Professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, and Senior Advisor to the President at the Woods Hole Research Center, a pre-eminent scientific think tank focused on the role of the terrestrial biosphere in global climate change. From January 2009 to January 2017, he was President Obama’s Science Advisor and Senate-confirmed Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), becoming the longest-serving Science Advisor to the President in the history of the position.... Read more about John Holdren

Scot T. Martin is the Gordon McKay Professor of Environmental Chemistry at Harvard University, with appointments in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences & the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

... Read more about Scot Martin

Daniel P. Schrag is the Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology at Harvard University, Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering, and Director of the Harvard University Center for the Environment.

Schrag studies climate and climate change over the broadest range of Earth history. He is particularly interested in how information on climate change from the geologic past can lead to better understanding of anthropogenic climate change in the future. In addition to his work on geochemistry and climatology, Schrag studies energy technology and policy, including carbon capture and storage and low-carbon synthetic fuels.

From 2009-2017, Schrag served on  President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.  Among various honors, he is the recipient of the James B. Macelwane Medal from the American Geophysical Union and a MacArthur Fellowship. Schrag earned a B.S. in geology and geophysics and political science from Yale University and his Ph.D. in geology from the University of California at Berkeley. He came to Harvard in 1997 after teaching at Princeton.

Geochemical oceanography, paleoclimatology, stable isotope geochemistry.

Assistant: Denise Sadler