Dervla Meegan-Kumar

Dervla Meegan Kumar received a bachelor’s degree in geological sciences from SUNY Binghamton in 2013 and a Master’s degree in geology and environmental science from the University of Pittsburgh in 2017. She was also a science communication intern with the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography in Washington D.C. before coming the University of Arizona. Dervla is now a PhD student in the department of Geosciences where she is reconstructing the past dynamics of the North American Monsoon. The North American Monsoon will become an increasingly important source of moisture in the arid Southwest as winter precipitation is expected to decline over the next century in response to rising atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, yet how anthropogenic climate change will impact the North American Monsoon is poorly understood, creating uncertainty in the future of water resources in the region. To characterize the natural variability of the North American Monsoon and its drivers, Dervla is using molecular and isotopic techniques to reconstruct a record of the system spanning the last 135,000 years from Gulf of California marine sediment cores.

Accepted Scholar: 

Accepted