Keir Soderberg joins our group

Keir Soderberg has recently joined the Princeton EcoHydrology Lab as a postdoctoral research associate.

Keir is our new postdoc-in-residence at the Mpala Research Station. Keir received his PhD from the University of Virginia in Environmental Sciences (a favorite department of our group!). Before graduate school in Virginia, Keir received a Masters degree from the University of Cape Town, and a BSc degree from Princeton University in Civil and Environmental Engineering! So it’s great to be able to welcome Keir back to Princeton, although he’ll spend most of his time 7,000 miles from campus at the Mpala Research Center in central Kenya.

Keir conducted his dissertation research in Namibia, where he used stable isotopes to determine plant water sources. A particular focus of his work was the importance of fog water as a resource for the rare and endemic Welwitchia mirabilis (picture to the right), which can live up to 2,000 years.

At Mpala, Keir will be integrating our tower-based water vapor isotope measurements with sampling of soil and plant water to better-constrain our estimates of E/T partitioning at the Mpala site.