Faculty
Miquela Ingalls
mki5108@psu.edu
814-865-7965
508 Deike Building
Assistant Professor
Department of Geosciences
Research
Our group works in modern and ancient environments to better understand how chemical sediments archive the environmental history of Earth and Mars. We combine field geology, petrography, geomicrobiology, and stable isotope geochemistry to improve the use of chemical sediments in reconstructions of ancient lake environments. We are particularly interested in the roles allocyclic (e.g., climate and tectonics) and autocylic (e.g., microbial metabolisms and redox chemistry) processes play in stromatolite formation throughout Earth history. We also develop novel proxies, such as ∆48 disequilibria and carbonate-associated phosphate, to understand early Earth aqueous and atmospheric chemistry.
Miquela Ingalls obtained her bachelors of science in Geology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2011, after which she worked for the USGS in Bozeman, MT. She earned her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2017 studying the tectonic evolution of the southern Tibetan Plateau and its implication for Cenozoic climate. Miquela pivoted to apply her isotope geochemistry toolkit to carbon cycling and microbial carbonate in alkaline-saline lakes, carbonate diagenesis, and phosphate during her postdoctoral training at CU-Boulder (2017-18) and as the Geological and Planetary Sciences Division Barr Postdoctoral Fellow at Caltech (2018-20). She began her position as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geosciences at Penn State in 2020 where she is building a carbonate clumped isotope and sedimentary geochemistry laboratory in the basement of Deike.
