Natasha Vokhshoori

Postdoctoral Scholar – Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History, Washington DC

PhD and MS in Ocean Sciences, University of California, Santa Cruz

BS in Earth Science, University of California, Santa Cruz

Dr. Natasha Vokhshoori is an Ecosystem Geochemist who focuses on using chemical, elemental and isotopic tools in order to reconstruct how base of the food web processes respond to environmental and climatic perturbations in marine and aquatic ecosystems. Dr. Vokhshoori typically employs shell archives of molluscs to reconstruct these changes for environments with extreme variability (e.g., nearshore upwelling margins, estuaries), those that are very difficult to sample (e.g., the deep-sea), or paleo-environments from either sediment cores or archaeological sites.

After completing her B.S. in Earth Sciences and M.S. and Ph.D. in Ocean Sciences from the University of California, Santa Cruz, Dr. Vokhshoori went on to do Postdoctoral research at the Smithsonian Institution’s Natural History Museum in the Anthropology Department in 2021. There, she worked with Archaeologists to investigate how the Medieval Climate Anomaly affected the maritime practices of the local Chumash Tribe on the Southern California Channel Islands. Using shells from archaeological middens found across all the islands, Vokhshoori used isotope climate proxies to reconstruct marine ecosystem structure through time. Before arriving to SLU in 2023, Dr. Vokhshoori taught field and lab-based courses in Limnology and Ecology at West Texas A&M.

Dr. Vokhshoori is interested in working with scholars across disciplines (Ecology, Archaeology, Geology, Oceanography, etc.) to address complex climate problems related to marine and aquatic ecosystems. She is teaching Global Climate at St. Lawrence University.