After four somewhat surreal, mostly fantastic years in Los Angeles as a postdoc at Caltech, I’m moving back to my hometown of Seattle to start as an assistant professor at the University of Washington School of Oceanography in January 2024.

As a kid, I was a huge UW sports fan. I remember one of my elementary school student teachers was a Pac-10 champion gymnast, and I went to watch the UW gymnastics team. I remembering listening to the UW softball team play in the Women’s College World Series on the radio. I was a batboy for a UW baseball game. I watched the magical 2004-2005 UW men’s basketball team full of Seattle kids make the Huskies a force to be reckoned with.

I’m incredibly excited to start up the Pavia Lab at UW in 2024, not just for my childhood connection to Seattle and UW sports. The UW School of Oceanography is an exceptional education and research community. I can’t wait to mentor and advise undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs. I’m eager to keep trying to unlock Earth’s tightly held secrets. It’s a very interesting time to be a chemical oceanographer and isotope geochemist – our research methods and topics are increasingly becoming applied to try and solve the climate crisis. This adds layers of both urgency and caution to the types of research our group will pursue, as both the results and consequences of our work will begin to extend far beyond basic science.

If you’re interested in either joining the Pavia Lab or working with us, please reach out. We are always interested in new collaborations and in pursuing new ideas. We’ll be enthusiastically spinning up our research program and taking advantage of all the excellent opportunities the UW College of the Environment and School of Oceanography have to offer. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll be watching the currently undefeated UW football team compete for a national championship just as we’re getting started.