James Farquhar is Distinguished University Professor and Chair of the Department of Geology and a member of the Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center (ESSIC) at the University of Maryland. Dr. Farquhar’s research is in the process of transitioning to focus on isotopic techniques fingerprinting and tracing atmospheric methane methane sources, both natural and anthropogenic, primarily in the mid-Atlantic states region – wetland emissions, emissions from combustion, emissions from human and agricultural sources. This is a new direction and draws on the recently acquired UMD Panorama to measure isotopologues (isotopic variants) of methane molecules with 0, 1, and 2 heavy isotope substitutions.

Dr. Farquhar’s past research focused on sulfur isotope geochemistry in a variety of terrestrial and extraterrestrial systems, spanning the modern to the ancient and extends from the atmosphere to the oceans and solid Earth. Farquhar and coworkers are best known for the discovery and interpretation of mass independent sulfur isotope signatures in samples from the early Earth that trace the evolution of oxygen and chemistry in the early atmosphere; in samples from Mars that tell of different conditions and reflect different reactions; and that provide tracers that track sulfur from surface reservoirs into other planetary reservoirs. Farquhar and coworkers have also used sulfur isotopes to trace metabolic and biogeochemical transformations for inorganic and organic sulfur compounds using laboratory experiments and ab initio approaches.

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Mojhgan Haghnegahdar is a NSF Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Geology at the University of Maryland College Park and SERC. She received a B.S in chemistry from Shiraz University, an M.S in chemistry from California State University Northridge (CSUN), and an M.S in geochemistry from UCLA and earned her Ph.D. in geochemistry from UCLA. Broadly, her research projects focus on isotope geochemistry and its applications in biogeochemistry, atmospheric chemistry, along with economical geochemistry. For her postdoctoral projects as President's Postdoctoral Fellow at UMD and later NSF Postdoctoral Fellow, she is continuing her research path in isotope biogeochemistry of methane.