Lab Director / Faculty
Lab Manager / Research Scientist
Postdoctoral Researchers
Emma Heitmann is a Pan Postdoctoral Research Fellow. She uses geochemistry and stable isotopes to study environmental change in the past, present, and future.
Graduate Students
Kly started his PhD in the Torres lab in the Fall of 2025. He received his bachelor's degree in Geophysical Science from the University of Chicago in 2024. His current research focuses on fluid-rock interactions, investigating how biogeochemical cycles respond to climate shifts and the geochemical controls on habitable environments.
Jorge Alberto Gomez is a PhD student who joined the department in Fall 2025 after receiving his bachelor’s degree in Earth Environmental and Geoscience and Romance Languages from Washington and Lee University. His research focuses currently focuses on tracking sulfate isotopes during seawater evaporation across different temperatures and humidities to use as a tracer of the amount of sulfate removed during gypsum precipitation.
Weidai is a PhD student who joined the Torres lab in Fall 2025. She received her bachelor’s degree in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences from Cornell University. Her current research focuses on using isotope tracers to understand freshwater drivers of coastal hypoxia in Bahia Almirante, Panama.
Melissa is a PhD student who arrived at Rice in 2026 after several years of working at a carbon capture start-up and the oil & gas industry. She received her BS in geochemistry from Caltech in 2019 and MS in Environmental Science and Policy from Johns Hopkins in 2022. She is interested in studying the impacts of industrialization and urbanization on the chemistry of rivers and the relationship between chemical weathering and the global carbon cycle.