Dr Valentine Schaaff
BSc, MSc, PhD
Expertise
Current positions
Marie Curie Research Fellow
School of Chemistry
Contact
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Biography
In 2020, I started my PhD focusing on a Holocene peat record from Cameroon at the ENS de Lyon and Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 (Lyon, France), under the supervision of Guillemette Ménot, Vincent Grossi and Matthew Makou. During my PhD, I developed strong skills in organic geochemistry from sample preparation to analysis using GC-MS, HPLC-MS, GC-IRMS (both carbon and hydrogen isotopes) and prep-GC. I used a wide range of lipid biomarkers including GDGTs, n-alkanes, hopanes, 5-n-alkylresorcinols to reconstruct changes in climatic parameters such as temperature or precipitation and their impact on local vegetation and peatland evolution.
I completed my PhD in 2023 and later expended my expertise to different type of samples and timespan: reconstructing past changes in vegetation and precipitation based on hyrax middens from Saudi Arabia (4ka to present) at the ENS de Lyon and working on a 1.3-Ma-long alkenone-based temperature record from the Mozambique Channel at CEREGE (Aix-en-Provence, France).
And now, I’m back to peatland study (kind of)! I joined the OGU as a Marie-Curie Research fellow, working with David Naafs on a large lignite database with samples covering the whole Cenozoic era. The project, called PeatCHEM (Peatland across the Cenozoic: pH Evolution using a Multiproxy biomarker approach), focused on pH using two recently developed pH proxies based on hopane and brGDGT. I work on understanding the parameters (vegetation, temperature, hydrology … ) influencing peat pH in lignite and the links between pH and methane cycling using diverse lipid biomarkers including hopanes, GDGTs, n-alkane and plant-derived triterpenoids.
I completed my PhD in 2023 and later expended my expertise to different type of samples and timespan: reconstructing past changes in vegetation and precipitation based on hyrax middens from Saudi Arabia (4ka to present) at the ENS de Lyon and working on a 1.3-Ma-long alkenone-based temperature record from the Mozambique Channel at CEREGE (Aix-en-Provence, France).
And now, I’m back to peatland study (kind of)! I joined the OGU as a Marie-Curie Research fellow, working with David Naafs on a large lignite database with samples covering the whole Cenozoic era. The project, called PeatCHEM (Peatland across the Cenozoic: pH Evolution using a Multiproxy biomarker approach), focused on pH using two recently developed pH proxies based on hopane and brGDGT. I work on understanding the parameters (vegetation, temperature, hydrology … ) influencing peat pH in lignite and the links between pH and methane cycling using diverse lipid biomarkers including hopanes, GDGTs, n-alkane and plant-derived triterpenoids.