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Francien Peterse is an Associate Professor at Utrecht University, where she leads the Organic Geochemistry group since 2014. Her research focuses on studying carbon cycle dynamics and past climate change through specific molecules known as biomarkers derived from microorganisms and plants. She extracts information about past environmental conditions from variations in the occurrence, distribution, and isotopic composition of biomarkers in sedimentary archives. A key challenge in her work is identifying suitable climate archives on land to generate continuous temperature records for entire continents. Her projects have resulted in paleotemperature records for locations such as monsoonal East Asia and the Pliocene Northwestern Europe. Currently, her PhD students are exploring sediments from Lake Chala in Kenya in the foothills of Mt. Kilimanjaro to generate a temperature record for tropical East Africa. Additionally, her latest project began in November 2019, aimed at deconvolving temperature and precipitation signals from East Asian Monsoon climate records, supported by an NWO-VIDI personal grant.
Department of Psychology