Research Staff & Technicians
Lia Crocker
Lia was drawn to Tucson from Pittsburgh after learning of Biosphere 2. She was inspired by greenhouses’ ability to create an artificial climate that could lead to habitable ecosystems on hostile land such as Antarctica or other planets. After a visit to Biosphere 2 and the University of Arizona, Lia knew that this was where she could pursue these goals by studying controlled environment agriculture as a Biosystems Engineering student and working at Biosphere 2. Lia started as an intern with the Biosphere 2 ocean team in 2019, continued being involved with B2O research for her senior capstone project and worked as a part time employee in 2020. After graduating with a BS in Biosystems Engineering in 2020, Lia completed an accelerated master’s program where her thesis research was associated with the WALD campaign analyzing volatile organic compounds of B2 rainforest leaf litter. In January 2022, Lia joined the Biosphere 2 ocean team full-time as a research specialist. She is passionate about the Biosphere and the extraordinary research opportunities that this one-of-a-kind facility offers especially regarding climate change and ecosystem remediation.
Sheela Gowrisankaran
coming soon
Postdoctoral Fellows
Graduate Students
Mikayla Deigan, PhD student
coming soon
Samantha King, PhD student (Ecology and Evolutionary Biology)
coming soon
Charlotte Goldstein, MS student
coming soon
Joaris Hernandez-Morales, MS student
Joaris is from Puerto Rico, and her experience during Hurricane Maria on the Island awakened an interest in studying geosciences and the climate. Therefore, she received a bachelor’s degree in geology from the University of Puerto Rico in Mayagüez. After conducting geochemical analysis on fossil corals from the Enriquillo Lake in the Dominican Republic during her bachelor’s, she decided to continue pursuing paleoclimate studies at the University of Arizona. Joaris started her master’s and joined the Tropical Climate and Coral Reef Lab in the fall of 2024. Her master’s thesis will focus on measuring the concentration of heavy metals (such as Manganese) from fossil corals in the Majuro atoll, Marshall Islands. The goal will be to see the source of it and the contamination possibility due to human activity in the atoll throughout the Little Ice Age (LIA) till the modern era.
Undergraduate Researchers
Tropical Climate & Coral Reefs Lab 