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. Duncan received his PhD in physical oceanography from Scripps
Institution of Oceanography, funded by a National Science Foundation Graduate
Research Fellowship. Prior to that, Duncan received a Bachelor of Science in
Physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked on optics
research with applications to photovoltaics. Duncan is interested in using ocean observations to inform the development of new physics theories and idealized models in coastal systems. Additionally, Duncan is interested in interdisciplinary work that uses the social sciences to identify how physical sciences can be done in a way that most effectively benefits society. For his PhD thesis, Duncan studied the impacts of infragravity frequency waves on shallow estuaries through turbulent boundary layer dynamics and performed an interview based study of coastal physical oceanography professors to understand the cultural conflicts and challenges that academic researchers face. At Tufts, Duncan is using observations from Greenland and Alaska to study ocean-glacier interactions.
Dr. Paul Summers
Paul received his PhD in Geophysics from Stanford University. His research focused on developing and applying custom ice sheet models to specific Antarctic glaciers, while incorporating and testing against field observations including satellite based velocity, atmospheric data, and radar sounding data sets. As a postdoc, Paul is affiliated with both Rutgers and Georgia Tech (co-advised by Alex Robel and Rebecca Jackson), and he is working on the NSF funded GLACIOME project, a multi-institution collaboration to understand the interaction of iceberg mélange in front of glaciers in Greenland with glaciers and the ocean beneath. Paul will focus on research involving modeling ocean circulation beneath a dense mélange pack within a fjord, including effects on melting of icebergs at the ocean interface.
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
Stella Becir
Stella is an undergraduate student at Tufts University studying Climate Science. She is from Los Angeles, California and is a passionate member of the Tufts Amalgamates, the oldest all-gender a cappella group on campus. Stella is working with data collected from West Greenland as part of the TERMINUS project to study ocean-glacier-sediment interactions.
Saskia Zimmerman
Saskia is a third-year undergraduate student at Tufts University. She is from Connecticut and she is majoring in Environmental Engineering. She is analyzing oceanographic data from LeConte Glacier, Alaska to investigate ocean-ice interactions.
Research Associates
Eli Hunter, Marine Scientist & Technician
Past Members
Jesse Cusack (website)
postdoc, 2020-2022
now: Assistant Professor at Oregon State University
Gabrielle Ricche
undergraduate REU researcher 2021
now: PhD student at University of Miami, Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science
Please get in touch if you are interested in research opportunities to join the group as a PhD student, postdoc, or undergraduate!