Education

Student opportunities

Undergraduate and graduate student research and employment opportunities are available within the lab. Please contact ACE Isotope Laboratory faculty and staff for more information.

Radiocarbon short course

The summer short course, Radiocarbon in Ecology and Earth System Science, is taught in collaboration with the University of California, Irvine and more recently also at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry. The course uses the textbook Radiocarbon and Climate Change: Mechanisms, Applications, and Laboratory Techniques edited by Schuur, Druffel, and Trumbore. The book’s nine chapters are united around understanding past, present, and future changes in the global carbon cycle and illustrate how radiocarbon can be used to address a range of questions in ecology and Earth system science.

The short course provides a mix of guest lecturers, teaching of laboratory skills, data interpretation, and student projects. Our course is unique in its focus on carbon cycling and the direct exposure to AMS radiocarbon technology; no other class like this exists in the US. In addition to applications of ¹⁴C to terrestrial ecosystems, we discuss its application to studies of past climates, physical and biological oceanography, and atmospheric science. It is our hope with this class that radiocarbon will become a standard scientific tool available for ecosystem and Earth system research in the future, as has happened with stable isotopes.