Julia Wilcots is a PhD student in Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences working with Professor Kristin Bergmann. She graduated cum laude from Princeton University with a bachelor’s degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering in 2016.
Julia is fascinated by the massive climate perturbations that have occurred throughout Earth history and the long-term evolution of marine chemistry. Using the physical and chemical characteristics of sedimentary rocks collected during field expeditions to Svalbard and Australia, Julia works to constrain surface temperatures on Earth around the “snowball Earth” glaciations ~700 million years ago. She has also developed quantitative methods for analyzing the ~2 billion-year-old North American rock record and used synchrotron radiation to study chemically precipitated rocks at the nanoscale. Julia hopes that by using a suite of quantitative tools to approach the sedimentary rock record from many spatial and temporal scales, she will better constrain Earth’s climate throughout geologic time.