Kyrstin Fornace

Kyrstin Fornace grew up in the Washington, D.C. area, where she spent many weekend afternoons coloring with the limited art supplies available in her father’s cancer research lab at the National Institutes of Health. She took on more active roles in labs as an undergraduate student at MIT. She spent several summers working in organic and inorganic synthetic chemistry before ending up in MIT Professor Ed Boyle’s chemical oceanography lab. There she found that environmental research provided the opportunity to combine her chemistry background with a long-held interest in the natural environment, particularly in past and present climate change. She entered the MIT/WHOI Joint Program in 2010, where her work with Ph.D. advisors Valier Galy and Konrad Hughen has focused on past climate change and terrestrial carbon cycling in tropical South America. Outside of her research, Fornace still spends some of her time doodling and occasionally posts geochemistry-themed cartoons.