Daniel Gaskell

Shell-forming organisms like corals and foraminifera biologically extract calcium and carbon from their environment and precipitate it into hard carbonate shells. By analyzing the chemistry of these shells, we can learn a great deal about the environment they grew in - how hot is was, how acidic, etc. We can even do this on fossil shells, letting us reconstruct Earth’s past climate and see how the Earth system has responded to climate changes in the past. At the same time, shell-forming organisms today are threatened by ocean acidification, pollution, and rising temperatures. To properly tackle both of these challenges, we need a better understanding of biomineralization - the cellular processes by which organisms actually build their shells.

As part of the overarching project “Building Shells: Towards a Mechanistic Understanding of Biomineralisation”, I use computer simulations of organisms’ internal chemistry to test and develop ideas about how shells form. At Cambridge, my initial focus is on developing a general-purpose modeling framework to analyze the data coming out of the lab’s culture experiments - metaphorically, building the factory to make the tools we need to answer our questions. I also apply these insights about biomineralization to improve proxy reconstructions of past climates, tackling fundamental climate-science topics such as polar amplification and marine carbon cycling in warmer worlds.