Samantha Carter was awarded a Presidential Fellowship by the Ohio State Graduate School. The Presidential Fellowship recognizes outstanding scholarly accomplishments and potential of doctoral students and provides a full year of support towards completion of their dissertations. Samantha earned her M.S. in Environmental and Earth Sciences at The University of Texas at Arlington in 2015 before continuing as a Ph.D. student with her current advisor, Elizabeth M. Griffith. Her MS thesis work using deep sea sediment cores (International Ocean Drilling Program “IODP” Expeditions 320/321) from the middle Miocene is published in Geology and contributes novel data on marine export production over this time period. 

Samantha's doctoral research focuses on reconstructing variability in the monsoon system over the past 11 million years, a topic of debate. The first chapter of her Ph.D. reports pore water radiogenic strontium isotope data from two cores drilled in the Arabian Sea through the Indus Fan in 2015 (IODP Expedition 355). Samantha is currently writing up her second chapter while she is preparing and analyzing the clay fraction separated from the cores on the newly installed thermal ionization mass spectrometer in the School of Earth Sciences. Her final project supported by the Presidential Fellowship will focus on expanding an existing advanced global carbon cycle model to include the barium cycle in the ocean and sediments. This modeling work will test our understanding of the barium cycle in our ocean – critical to validate the use of this geochemical proxy for reconstructing changes in the export of organic carbon from the surface of the oceans into the deep ocean.