Jack Lamb

My research is developing low-cost sensors to make better measurements of greenhouse gas emissions. The global carbon cycle is a huge web of carbon sources and sinks, encompassing both natural ecosystems and human activity. Investigating natural ecosystems remains a major challenge for measurement due to the size and complexity of the system; for example, how do you begin to measure the balance of growth and decomposition in the Amazon basin? My research seeks to develop low cost, automated sensors to measure the exchange of greenhouse gases in environmental settings. Recent commercialization of sensor technologies makes it possible to build these tools for 1% of the cost of previous systems, thus enabling research projects that would have been impossible before. Moreover, my goal is to make these tools available to under-resourced institutions in the global tropics, where equipment expenses have been a major barrier.