The Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences Department is excited to introduce the participants of the new EXPLORE Program (Earth & PLanetary Opportunities in REsearch). Students will work with EEPS faculty or affiliates on research or experiential projects or internships, designed to enhance their knowledge of the field and understand the scientific challenges that we face today. Student projects can be tailored to suit student interests and may involve working in faculty labs, conducting field work, analyzing data sets of different types, or running numerical models of Earth and planetary processes.
Meet our 2025-26 EXPLORERS:
Oksana Arevalo - (Faculty mentor: Carrie Masiello)
Oksana is a rising junior majoring in Chemistry and minoring in Anthropology. She is interested in conservation efforts, improving local plant diversity, and exploring new methods to decrease global carbon emissions.
Project: Optimizing flash elemental analyzers to measure the percent carbon in biochar
Calla Doh - (Faculty mentor: Carrie Masiello)
Calla Doh is a freshman at Rice University from Northern Virginia. She is studying Environmental Science with a concentration in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and is minoring in Poverty, Justice, and Human Capabilities. She is interested in sustainable food systems transformation by bridging science and policy work related to sustainable agriculture, climate change mitigation, and global food security.
Project: Industrial applications of biochar for soil remediation
Ainsley Ganti - (Faculty mentor: Rajdeep Dasgupta)
Ainsley Ganti is a senior from Maryland studying Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences and dabbling in French Studies. Ainsley is interested in applying concepts from geochemistry to questions in planetary science, particularly how planets form and subsequent implications for habitability.
Project: Using high P-T experiments to study aubrite (meteorite) formation
Evan Gebhart - (Faculty mentor: Sylvia Dee)
Evan is a rising senior from Cape Elizabeth, Maine, studying Physics and minoring in Mathematics and Environmental Studies. He is interested in atmospheric dynamics, cloud microphysics, and how global and regional climate models simulate physical processes under climate change.
Project: Climate change impacts and modeling within the Mississippi River Basin
Benjamin Kwait-Gonchar - (Faculty mentor: Andre Izidoro)
Ben is a junior from Brooklyn, New York, majoring in Astrophysics and Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences. He is interested in studying astrobiology and planetary habitability as well as exploring analog environments to better understand processes on other worlds.
Project: Data requirements for testing the habitable zone theory
Jim Jin - (Faculty mentor: Sahar Bakhshian)
Jim is a sophomore majoring in Statistics from Hangzhou, China. My research interest lies primarily in data science & machine learning, energy systems, and resource chemistry.
Project: Predictive Modeling for Optimization of Heat and Lithium Co-Production in
Fractured Geothermal reservoirs
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am Leff - (Faculty mentor: Julia Morgan)
Adam Leff is a senior majoring in Environmental Science and minoring in Creative Writing. He is interested in applying his knowledge of geologic and climatic systems to deepen our understanding of natural disasters. Eventually, he wants to use that predictive knowledge to help mitigate the damage caused by those natural disasters through a combination of scientific communication and research.
Project: Analysis of 2018 earthquakes and eruption at Kilauea Volcano for natural disaster preparation
Jeremy Lin - (Faculty mentor: Melodie French)
Jeremy Lin is a senior from Houston, Texas, majoring in Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences. His main interest is in earthquakes, specifically the mechanics of faulting and earthquake initiation, propagation, and cessation across multiple tectonic settings and regions, with relation to rock rheology and applications for seismic hazard estimation, disaster mitigation, and environmental protection.
Project: Constraining the role of mechanical heterogeneity in controlling megathrust seismogenic zones via local catalogs.
Nat Pujet - (Faculty mentor: André Izidoro)
Nat Pujet is a junior from Boulder, Colorado, majoring in Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences with a Planetary Science specialization and minoring in Physics. Nat is interested in planetary habitability, outer solar system icy moons, and the formation and evolution of planetary systems.
Project: Formation of small rocky planets from low-mass disks
Charlotte Raymond - (Faculty mentor: Mark Torres)
Charlotte Raymond is a sophmore intending to major in Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Science with a concentration in Planetary Science. She is interested in planetary habitability, astrobiology, and planetary cycles.
Project: Nature of planet-wide elemental cycles, e.g., water, carbon, and silica, and applications to astrobiology and planetary habitability
Seunggyu Shin - (Faculty mentor: Kirsten Siebach & Ellie Moreland)
Seunggyu Shin is a junior at Rice University from Utah studying Computer Science. He is interested in applications of computer science and space and planetary sciences, combining these areas through EEPS research.
Project: Developing compositional mixing models in software for processing geochemical data
Kemi Tytler - (Faculty mentor: Sahar Bakhshian)
Kemi a rising sophomore at Hanszen College pursuing a degree in Chemical Engineering, with interests in CO2 conversion, renewable energy, and environmental sustainability.
Project: Source-to-Sink Integrated Modeling of Carbon Capture and Storage
Isabel Wasserman - (Faculty mentor: Mark Torres and Sylvia Dee)
Isabel Wasserman is a senior majoring in Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences and intending to minor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. She is interested in the impacts of climate change on Earth systems, patterns of global change, and geobiology.
Project: Quantifying the impact of agricultural activity and nitrogenous fertilizers on weathering and atmospheric pCO2
Malcolm Wigder - (Faculty mentor: Helge Gonnermann)
Malcolm Wigder is a senior at Rice from Boca Raton, Florida. He is majoring in Math and Physics and minoring in creative writing. He is interested in both the physical experimentation and the numerical modeling that goes into EEPS research.
Project: Modeling Two-phase flow
Megan Wright - (Faculty mentor: Carrie Masiello)
Megan Wright is a senior majoring in Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences with a concentration in Environmental Earth Science. She is interested in analytical chemistry as it applies to oceanic and atmospheric carbon, and in the cycling of carbon between reservoirs as it relates to climate change.
Project: Sources and concentrations of organic carbon particulates in the oceanic sediments, applied to carbon sequestration
Jessica Xu - (Faculty mentor: Melodie French)
Jessica is an undergraduate student from Dallas, TX interested in resource extraction's chemical and geological foundations. She hopes to develop an understanding of environmental on human health impacts, specifically in consideration of how energy production contributes to pollution impacting various communities in the United States.
Project: Modeling fracture closing rates in geothermal energy systems
Jeffrey Youngson- (Faculty mentor: Julia Morgan and Pat McGovern)
Jeffrey is a senior from Birmingham, Alabama, currently majoring in Astrophysics and pursuing a minor in Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Science. His interests lie in planetary and stellar structure and formation, as well as the physical mechanisms that drive them.
Project: Identifying and characterizing morphologic lineaments within and around the northern hemisphere of Mars as a test of impact-induced volcanism and tectonism
Charlie Zhu- (Faculty mentor: Duncan Keller)
Charlie is a senior currently majoring in Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences. His interests include geophysics, subsurface geology and geochemistry.
Project: Linking textures to chemical data in deformed mantle xenoliths
Former Explorers
Kathryn Phung - (Faculty mentor: Carrie Masiello)
Kathryn Phung worked in Chemistry on a thesis titled "13C - NMR Analysis of Composts: Implications for Emerging Carbon Markets". Kathryn is currently finishing up an Masters in Public Health at University of Texas.
Valentina Osorio- (Faculty mentor: Mark Torres)
Valentina Osorio worked in EEPS and Chemistry on a thesis titled "Rainy with a Chance of Sea Salt: Sourcing the Sulfur in Houston’s Rainfall". Valentina is continuing her studies at CU Boulder to earn a PhD in Analytical, Environmental and Atmospheric Chemistry.
Marlo Wilcox- (Faculty mentor: Kirsten Siebach)
Marlo graduated in 2024 in Environmental Science with an Earth Science concentration, completing a thesis titled "Vikings, Volcanoes, and Satellites: An Analysis of Icelandic NDVI Trends and the Problem of Scale in Vegetation Remote Sensing". Marlo will continue this area of research during the 2024 summer in northern Sweden, collecting drone imagery of a thawing permafrost peatland and using it to leverage surface and subsurface ground measurements.