Carrots, Climate, and Contaminants Research
Last updated September 2025
My postdoctoral research focuses on how climate change may affect the transfer of heavy metals from soils to edible crop roots, using carrots as a model root vegetable. This project experimentally investigates the rhizosphere biogeochemical dynamics of the hazardous metal cadmium and the nutritional metal zinc in contaminated agricultural soils.
The carrots were grown in Germany under current European and predicted year 2100 climate conditions: +3 °C and +300 ppm CO2 (IPCC SSP2-4.5). My student mentee and I are currently analyzing soil geochemistry with a weekly time resolution to understand the temporal dynamics of cadmium and zinc release from soils and consequent accumulation in carrots under different climate conditions.
I am also using gene and transcript qPCR, as well as amplicon sequencing, to understand the adaptation of the soil microbial community to future climatic conditions. This approach is combined with root exudate metabolite profiling to investigate root-microbe interactions under climate and metal stress. In the future, I will map the root-zone distributions of cadmium and zinc using X-ray fluorescence mapping and time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry to achieve even higher-resolution chemical speciation maps of the soil-carrot interface.
As part of this project, I mentored an undergraduate for two months and am currently mentoring a master's student for her eight-month soil geochemistry and ecotoxicology thesis. The findings will be published as two or three open-access first-author papers in high-impact journals.
This work advances our understanding of how climate change and soil contamination interact to influence root-vegetable safety, nutrition, and yields. My multi-faceted projects provide rich and exciting opportunities for undergraduate student researchers, and I am enthusiastic about the prospect of engaging more students through this work.