Matthew Deinhardt is the Marketing and Communications Manager at Tulane University’s School of Science & Engineering. Deinhardt joined the Tulane team in August 2024, with over a decade of experience planning and promoting major national events and working in civil advocacy. He advocated for expanded civil rights for Latinos at the National Council of La Raza (now UnidosUS) in Washington, DC. He championed greener chemistry and engineering solutions at The American Chemical Society’s Green Chemistry Institute in DC and expanded executive education opportunities for government employees through the Brookings Institute’s partnership with WashU in St. Louis. He most recently worked on Madison Avenue as a marketing manager for the media company, Trooh. He also advocates for marginalized communities in his free time as a volunteer for the Human Rights Campaign, the Trevor Project, and the ACLU. Deinhardt earned his BBA degree from The College of William & Mary, double majoring in Marketing and French and Francophone Studies.

A Maryland native, Lise attended Vanderbilt University for undergraduate studies before completing her Ph.D. in neuroscience at the University of Virginia, specializing in the electrophysiological development of induced pluripotent stem cell-derived neurons.   She is now a post-doctoral researcher in Jeff Tasker's lab, investigating how neuronal circuits in the HPA axis regulate stress responses.

My name is Wayne Wagner, and I am a professor of practice in the Department of River and Coastal Science and Engineering. My educational interests focus on teaching new ways to think. Over two decades of teaching, I have taught numerous classes (and taken quite a few more) and the best all focus on the students' cognitive development. Students always ask how they'll use specific facts, and I believe that they often will not use them. However, within a given discipline, the best educators teach how to think, analyze, and synthesize. These skills are useful, regardless of the student's future.

My scientific interests center on physical processes in natural water and how they affect the biological and human systems on which they rely. I don't research any more, but I do enjoy thinking on it! After doing undergraduate work in civil engineering at Auburn University and getting a master's degree in secondary math education at the University of New Orleans, my curiosity drove me into academia. I studied California's complex Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta under Mark Stacey at Berkeley (for grad school) and Louisiana's beautiful Wax Lake Delta under David Mohrig at the the University of Texas at Austin (for a postdoc). My graduate training specifically focused on environmental fluid mechanics, but I branched out into statistics, geomorphology, and remote sensing, among other fields. I enjoy a good problem, great colleagues, and a better world.

Apart from science and education, my hobbies include running, reading, ping pong, frisbee, backpacking, and, of course, my dog. 

I focus on the biogeochemical cycling of pollutants (especially mercury, Hg) and nutrients under global change. My research integrates Earth system/land surface models with observational data and measurements to understand how these elements move through the Earth system, using an interdisciplinary approach across ecology, atmospheric science, biology, and environmental science.

Selected Publications

1. Tengfei Yuan, Shaojian Huang, Peng Zhang, Zhengcheng Song, Jun Ge, Xin Miao, Yujuan Wang, Qiaotong Pang, Dong Peng, Peipei Wu, Junjiong Shao, Peipei Zhang, Yabo Wang, Hongyan Guo, Weidong Guo, and Yanxu Zhang*. Potential decoupling of CO2 and Hg uptake process by global vegetation in the 21st century. Nature Communications 15, 4490 (2024).
2. Tengfei Yuan, Peng Zhang, Zhengcheng Song, Shaojian Huang, Xun Wang, and Yanxu Zhang*. Buffering Effect of Global Vegetation On the Air-Land Exchange of Mercury: Insights From a Novel Terrestrial Mercury Model Based On Cesm2-Clm5. Environment International 174 (2023): 107904.
3. Tengfei Yuan et al. Fungi and bacteria trade-off mediates drought-induced reduction in wood decomposition. Catena. 2024, 243(April), 108169.
4. Shaojian Huang, Tengfei Yuan, Zhengcheng Song, Dong Peng, Peng Zhang, Ruirong Chang, Peipei Wu, Guiyao Zhou, Fange Yue, Zhouqing Xie, Feiyue Wang, Yanxu Zhang*. Oceanic Evasion Fuels Arctic Summertime Rebound of Atmospheric Mercury and Drives Transport to Arctic Terrestrial Ecosystems, Nature Communications, in press.
5. Junjiong Shao, Tengfei Yuan, Zhen Li, Nan Li, Huiying Liu, Shahla Hosseini Bai, Jianyang Xia, Meng Lu and Xuhui Zhou*.Plant evolutionary history mainly explains the variance in biomass responses to climate warming at a global scale. New Phytologist 2019, 222(3):1338-1351.
6. Shaojian Huang#, Feiyue Wang, Tengfei Yuan, Zhengcheng Song, Peipei Wu, and Yanxu Zhang*. Modeling the Mercury Cycle in the Sea Ice Environment: A Buffer Between the Polar Atmosphere and Ocean. Environmental Science & Technology (2023)
7. Zhengcheng Song, Shaojian Huang, Peng Zhang, Tengfei Yuan, and Yanxu Zhang*. Isotope Data Constrains Redox Chemistry of Atmospheric Mercury. Environmental Science & Technology. 2024
8. Yanxu Zhang*, Peng Zhang, Zhengcheng Song, Shaojian Huang, Tengfei Yuan, Peipei Wu, Viral Shah, Maodian Liu, Long Chen, Xuejun Wang, Jun Zhou, and Yannick Agnan. An updated global mercury budget from a coupled atmosphere-land-ocean model: 40% more re-emissions buffer the effect of primary emission reductions. One Earth. 2023, 6(3), 316-325.
9. Peipei Wu, Zhengcheng Song, Peng Zhang, Shaojian Huang, Tengfei Yuan, and Yanxu Zhang*. Atmospheric monomethylmercury: Inferred sources constrained by observations and implications for human exposure. Environment International 193 (2024): 109127
10. Miao He, Guiyao Zhou, Tengfei Yuan, KJ van Groenigen , Junjiong Shao, Xuhui Zhou*. Grazing intensity significantly changes the C : N : P stoichiometry in grassland ecosystems. Global Ecol Biogeogr. 2020; 29: 355–369.
     

Dr. James Park received his undergraduate B.S. in chemical and biomolecular engineering from Cornell University. Following graduation, James obtained a position with Merck & Co., Inc., where he first worked as a process engineer supporting live viral vaccine manufacturing. During this time, James supported start-up facility activities to expand manufacturing capacity for varicella vaccine manufacturing. James then transitioned into process R&D, supporting the scale-up of fermentation processes for monoclonal antibody production for pre-clinical trials.

James subsequently obtained his PhD from the University of Delaware (Newark, DE) under the mentorship of Dr. Babatunde Ogunnaike and co-mentorship of Drs. Jim Schwaber, and Rajanikanth Vadigepalli at Thomas Jefferson University (Philadelphia, PA). Here, James applied engineering approaches to analyze gene expression heterogeneity at the single neuron level, which led to the development of a conceptual framework and quantitative models that reconciled single neuron transcriptional heterogeneity and the robust regulation of blood pressure setpoint within the cardiovascular system. Following his PhD, James took up a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Systems Biology (Seattle, WA), where he worked on computational and experimental methods to identify gene regulatory network mechanisms driving tumor cell, multi-omic heterogeneity at the single-cell level in glioblastoma.

James joined the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Tulane University as an assistant professor in 2025 where he continues his research in cell-to-cell multiomic heterogeneity.