Field of Study USA: Geology

Thomas Varner

Mr. Thomas Varner, Originally from Northern Indiana, graduated from the School of Engineering at the University of Mississippi with a B.Sc. in Geology in 2018. During his time as an undergraduate in Mississippi, his interest in the natural processes that shape our planet’s surface flourished while investigating the extent of uranium decay in detrital zircons to unravel the ancestral pathway of the Mississippi River. These research endeavors led to Mr. Varner receiving the Who’s Who Award at the University of Mississippi and directed Mr. Varner towards graduate research addressing water-related issues impacting societies across the globe.

Mr. Varner is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at San Antonio where his research focuses the transportation of arsenic along tidally fluctuating river systems in Bangladesh, a region where millions of people are negatively impacted by elevated concentrations of arsenic in the underlying aquifers used for drinking purposes. Facets of Mr. Varner’s research have been presented at numerous conferences including the Geological Society of America, American Geophysical Union, Goldschmidt, and the International Congress & Exhibition on Arsenic in the Environment. The culmination of Mr. Varner’s research, titled “Contribution of Sedimentary Organic Matter to Arsenic Mobilization along a Potential Natural Reactive Barrier (NRB) near a River: The Meghna River, Bangladesh” was published in Chemosphere. Mr. Varner is passionate about investigating the occurrence and transportation of inorganic and organic contaminants in drinking water systems with an aim to provide options for in-situ remediation in natural environments.

Mr. Varner, as part of the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship, is researching a naturally occurring phenomena along the tidally fluctuating Hooghly River leading to the precipitation of iron in the adjacent sediments which may protect the river and aquifer from the cross-contamination of arsenic and other pollutants. This phenomenon is known as the “Iron Curtain” and is the result of the surface water-groundwater mixing within the sediments surrounding the river. The results from this study will be compared to the subsequent findings from a similar study along the Meghna River in Bangladesh. Together, these studies will be used to develop a universal river-aquifer contaminant transport model.

Melanie Cham

Melanie Cham graduated from Wesleyan University in 2024 with majors in earth and environmental science and archaeology. During her time at Wesleyan, she studied bacterial speciation and diversity with Dr. Frederick Cohan. This led to a summer research project funded by Wesleyan’s College of Integrative Sciences studying the effects of microplastics on the bacterial strains found in agricultural soils. The results of this research were presented at the 2021 Wesleyan Research in Science symposium and has been published by the American Chemical Society.

Melanie’s academic interest lies in learning more about the past. In 2021, she began research with Dr. Dana Royer in earth and environmental sciences at Wesleyan. During this study, she measured the stomatal index of red maples by simulating environmental conditions from the Eocene to the Miocene to observe how plant anatomy varies with changes in the atmosphere. In 2022, with support from the McNair Scholars Program, she began an independent project, titled “A Novel Method for Estimating Carbon Assimilation Rates from Fossil Leaves”, with Dr. Caroline Strömberg at the University of Washington. For this research, instead of using living organisms to interpret the past, she began using fossils to infer ecological responses to contemporary global warming. Melanie has presented her work at four national conferences: 2022 UCLA National McNair Conference; 2022 Geological Society of America Conference; 2023 Botanical Society of America Conference; and 2024 Mid-Continental Palaeobotanical Colloquium. She is set to begin her PhD in biology at the University of Washington in Fall 2025.

In her Fulbright-Nehru program, Melanie is conducting paleontological research with Dr. Bandana Samant at the Central University of Punjab. The goal of the project is to estimate regional atmospheric carbon dioxide levels before the mass extinction event of the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary (K–Pg) which occurred 66 million years ago. For this, she is using information from microscopic leaf fossils collected from the Deccan Volcanic Province (DVP) of India. This novel use of gas-exchange modeling with fossils from the DVP have the potential to strengthen the current assumptions of CO2 which are based on different proxies.

Joseph Meert

Dr. Joseph Meert, originally from Jackson, Michigan, completed his bachelor’s (1986) and master’s (1988) in geology from the University of Florida. He got his PhD in geology from the University of Michigan in 1993. The focus of his doctoral work was on Precambrian tectonics and paleogeographic reconstructions. Dr. Meert completed a short (eight-month) postdoctoral fellowship at the same institution before assuming an assistant professorship at Indiana State University in Terre Haute, Indiana, until 2001. Following a one-year sabbatical to Norway and France, he moved to the University of Florida in Gainesville where he is currently a professor and undergraduate coordinator in geological sciences. Dr. Meert and his wife are celebrating their 30th year of marriage and are proud parents of Joseph, Brian, and Alex. They enjoy raising butterflies and bluebirds in their garden.

Dr. Meert’s research on Earth’s paleogeography has continued apace with a focus on the assembly of Peninsular India between 2.3 to 0.5 billion years ago. He has worked on five continents and published more than 170 articles and book chapters. His research in India has garnered international press attention. Most recently, he was featured in New York Times (Forget the Fossil Error It isn’t the First) and the French magazine Science & Vie (“ERREUR sur les fossile!”). Dr. Meert is also a fellow of the Geological Society of America and has served as president and vice president of the International Association for Gondwana Research.

Dr. Meert’s Fulbright-Nehru project in India is examining the Vindhyan sedimentary basin in both Rajasthan and the Son Valley region to solve a long-standing conundrum regarding the age of the rocks and their role in India’s geological history. His research is using the study of fossil magnetism to determine their past location and geochronology to provide a temporal framework. He is also teaching a short course in paleogeography and paleomagnetism at his host institution and hopes to generate student interest in these fields.

Mainak Mookherjee

Dr. Mainak Mookherjee obtained his BSc (1997) from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, and his MSc (1999) from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai. He went on to earn his PhD (2003) from the University of Cambridge. He moved to the U.S. in 2003 for postdoctoral research at the University of Michigan (2003–2005) and Yale University (2006–2008). Dr. Mookherjee then joined Bayreisches Geoinstitut, Bayreuth, Germany, as a visiting researcher in 2008. He returned to the U.S. in 2012 as a research scientist at Cornell University. Since 2015, Dr. Mookherjee has been a faculty member at Florida State University. In 2019, he was tenured and promoted from assistant to associate professor, and in 2024, to full professor.

Dr. Mookherjee’s primary research interest lies in understanding the processes that occur in the Earth’s interior. He uses a combination of experimental methods and complementary numerical simulations to understand the cycling/exchange of volatiles such as hydrogen/water and carbon dioxide between the Earth’s exosphere and its interior.

Geophysical observations have often indicated a presence of low viscosity channel which explains the southward extrusion of the Himalaya. The likely cause of this low viscosity channel is partial melting. In his Fulbright-Nehru project, Dr. Mookherjee is examining whether Himalayan crustal rocks contain trace quantities of water. This will help Earth scientists to gain insight into collisional dynamics and volatile cycling. He is also attempting to constrain the water contents in nominally anhydrous minerals of Himalayan crustal rocks. In addition, he is providing constraints to the physical properties of water-bearing melts which will enable geophysicists to test the low viscosity channel hypothesis.