Today at Brown

Meredith Hastings doesn’t see herself as a crusader, but she is hoping her research will make waves.

Hastings, who joins the Department of Geological Sciences as an assistant professor, focuses on what she calls “policy-relevant research” — research that is relevant to people’s lives, be it air quality, the effects of acid rain or another hot-button topic.

“I am a physical scientist,” said the 31-year-old Hastings, who grew up in Florida and attended the University of Miami, followed by a Ph.D. from Princeton. “I am not going to make public policy or suggest how it should be made. But I would like to engage with people who are doing that.”

As a youth, Hastings thought she was destined for the marine sciences. She attended a magnet school in Dade County devoted to studying the oceans, and she majored in marine sciences and chemistry at Miami. Then she took a year off from school to work at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluids Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J.

It was a seminal experience. Hastings was exposed to atmospheric chemistry and climate modeling. She left the oceans for the air. “It opened my eyes to a whole set of tools and questions that [scientists] were working on,” she said.

She works now on unraveling the nitrogen cycle — how the cycle occurs naturally and how it has been altered since humans, chiefly through the burning of fossil fuels, began emitting nitrogen oxides, which can react with other substances to form smog and acid rain. Hastings wants to know how changes to the cycle have affected past climate and to understand how human influences today may affect future climate and air quality.

“That just makes it so fundamentally interesting,” she said. “We know there’s been this new source (human activity) added to the system.”

Her research has taken her to Greenland, where she collected air, snow, and ice core samples in 2005 and 2006. She also has a grant request pending to take ice core samples of nitrates and sulfates in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

When she’s not in the field or in her office, it’s a fair bet you’ll find Hastings at a local club, cheering for her husband, Eric, a drummer who plays a wide assortment of music, including Brazilian rock, country and jazz.

“It’s a fun balance in my life,” Hastings said.