Group Members
Dr. Rebecca Jackson, Assistant Professor
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth & Climate Sciences at Tufts University and an affiliate of the Department of Marine & Coastal Sciences at Rutgers University. Prior to Tufts, I was an Assistant Professor at Rutgers, and before that a NOAA Climate and Global Change postdoc fellow at Oregon State University. I received my PhD in physical oceanography from the MIT-WHOI Joint Program.
My research focuses on ocean-glacier interactions, coastal dynamics, and polar processes. Broadly, I am interested in how heat and freshwater are exchanged between the ocean and cryosphere, and I explore these dynamics across a range of scales, from the ocean-ice boundary layer to the continental shelf ocean. See Research section for more details!
Link to CV (Feb 2025)
Postdocs
Dr. Duncan Wheeler
Duncan is a postdoc in the Department of Earth & Climate Sciences at Tufts
University. His research interests are in understanding boundary processes in the ocean using a combination of observations and idealized models. He is also interested in interdisciplinary work and understanding how to identify scientific questions that are directly helpful for coastal communities. Duncan received his PhD in physical oceanography from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, funded by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. For his PhD thesis, he studied the impacts of infragravity frequency waves on shallow estuaries through turbulent boundary layer dynamics and performed an interview based study of coastal physical oceanographey professors to understand cultural conflicts and challenges that academic researchers face. Duncan's postdoctoral research focuses on characterizing water velocities near ocean terminating glaciers in Greenland and Alaska and how those velocities increase melt rates. He is currently using data collected by remotely operated vehicles to study buoyant plume dynamics at Xeitl Sít in Alaska.
Dr. Paul Summers
Paul is a postdoc in the Department of Earth & Climate Sciences at Tufts
University. His research focuses on the processes that control the fastest flowing ice of Earth’s ice sheets, from ice divide until where the glacier calves and melts into the ocean. He received his PhD from Stanford University where he developed numerical models to understand the processes that control the width of ice streams in Antarctica. As a postdoc he works with Rebecca Jackson at Tufts and Alex Robel at the Georgia Institute of Technology to build a coupled Glacier-Mélange-Ocean model. This project will help us understand the complex, coupled fjord system that controls ice mass loss at the marine boundary of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Glacier calving and submarine melt represents roughly half of Greenland's total contribution to global sea level, yet these processes remain poorly understood. Through this work, we hope to better understand what feedback processes control ice mass loss and fresh water export from the Greenlands Ice Sheet.
PhD Students
Bridget Ovall
Bridget is a PhD student in the Graduate Program in Oceanography at Rutgers, funded by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. She earned a B.S. in Oceanography from the University of Washington. She then spent a year working with Bob Pickart at WHOI, where she conducted research exploring the relationship between wind forcing, ice cover, and circulation in the Chukchi Sea. Bridget’s PhD work looks at water modification and mixing at tidewater glaciers, focusing on subglacial discharge plumes and their feedbacks on glacier melt. As an observational oceanographer, her work often involves the use of autonomous and remotely-operated vehicles collecting novel observations at glacier termini.
Lois Andersen
Lois is a PhD student in the Graduate Program in Oceanography at Rutgers. She completed her B.S. in Geophysical Science at the University of Chicago, where she first became interested in the changing cryosphere. As an undergraduate, she got her first taste of fieldwork towing ground-penetrating radar across Taku glacier with the Juneau Icefield Research Program. At Rutgers, Lois's work investigates interaction between marine-terminating glaciers and the ocean through fjord systems in West Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), using coupled plume-ocean models and observations. Her current focus is understanding how the fjord-scale exchange of heat and freshwater in Kangerlussuup Sermia fjord changes in response to different forcing scenarios (e.g. winds, glacial melt). Outside of Rutgers, Lois serves as an organizer and instructor for the Coastal Ocean Environment Summer School in Nigeria and Ghana (COESSING), a capacity-building program for marine scientists in West Africa.
Undergraduate Students
Juliet Baker
Juliet is an undergraduate at Tufts University studying Climate Sciences and International Relations. She grew up in Paris, France, and spent her summers on Martha’s Vineyard, where she first became curious about the ocean and coastal environments. Juliet is currently analyzing oceanographic data collected by a DTS fiber optic cable from the GreenFjord Fiber project to investigate ocean-ice interactions in Greenlandic fjords.
Sebastian Moreno-Comstock
Research Associates
Eli Hunter, Marine Scientist & Technician
Past Members
Postdocs
Jesse Cusack (now: Assistant Professor at Oregon State University)
Undergrads
Saskia Zimmerman
Stella Becir
Gabrielle Ricche
Please get in touch if you are interested in research opportunities to join the group as a postdoc or undergraduate researcher!