My research interests revolve around the study of sedimentary response to tectonic events and sea-level changes over various time scales. If we hope to interpret such events as the tectonic timing of mountain belts, the history of eustasy or climate change, we must first understand how these events influence sedimentary basin development and deposition. Unfortunately, studies of modern systems, while showing us active depositional processes, can not be simply scaled up to explain the evolution of stratigraphy that took millions of years to develop.
Sedimentary basins are more than the simple addition of many short-term events.
Over long time periods, basin stratigraphy is primarily controlled by rates of change of sediment supply, basin subsidence and sea level. Since these factors can all be changing simultaneously, unique interpretation of stratigraphy is, at best, not trivial. Our approach to basin analysis involves field observations, process modeling, geomechanics and thinking. A multidisciplinary approach is thus needed to study the interplay between sedimentation, tectonics and eustatics. Such subdisciplines as lithofacies interpretation, sedimentary petrology, basin analysis, subsidence analysis, paleohydraulic reconstruction, geophysical modeling and age dating are all brought to bare.