Benjamin is a fourth-year PhD Candidate in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (MIT-WHOI) Joint Program. He gained an interest in climate science from his undergraduate research in geochemistry at Washington University in Saint Louis. He is now working on understanding how the ocean influences monsoon systems during abrupt climate changes, like those spurred by explosive volcanic eruptions, glacial outburst floods, and greenhouse gases. This involves using geochemical paleoclimate archives from stalagmites in Madagascar in combination with state-of the art climate models.
Outside of his graduate research, he has been active in the scientific community organizing student-based conferences and workshops, such as the Graduate Climate Conference (GCC) in Woods Hole, MA and the Summer School on Speleothem Science (S4) in São Paulo, Brazil. Over the past few years, he has also been a teaching assistant for MIT’s Terrascope learning community.