Contact:

Email:  julianna@lanl.gov

Dr. Julianna Fessenden-Rahn is a Staff Scientist in the Hydrology, Geochemistry and Geology Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).   Her research focus includes:  CO2 measurement, monitoring and accounting (MVA) technologies and methods; stable isotopes; forest ecology; plant physiology; paleoclimate reconstructions; environmental restoration; forensics, and carbon sequestration.  .  Dr. Fessenden-Rahn joined LANL in 2002 as a postdoctoral fellow and two years later became a technical staff member.  In addition to her research activities, she is also involved with numerous science education projects.  In 2009, she was the recipient of the LANL Star Award. 

From 2005-2008, Dr. Fessenden-Rahn served as the MVA coordinator for the SWP which involved coordinating a team tasked with 1) choosing the best tools to track CO2 movement, leakage, impacts on caprock and overlying reservoirs, 2) recruiting the best people to do the research on these tools, 3) facilitating and coordinating all research for the geologic experiments, 4) addressing regulatory requirements and issues to allow the research to progress and 5) assessing and optimizing the MVA tool sets to create an economically feasible network that will capture required information.  Specifically, she was heavily involved in creating MVA deployable systems (assessing technologies, creating operational systems, suggesting temporal/spatial resolution of data, economic assessments) for the SACROC oil field, the Aneth oil field, and the San Juan Basin Coal-Bed Methane field.  Her role required her to coordinate the efforts of about 40 different scientists and students.  In as much, she hosted monthly telecons with the team for information exchange between the scientists, progress reports, assessments, and needs.  She also helped with the permitting issues that arose at the San Juan Basin site.  She also hosted monthly cross-partnership telecons with the MVA leaders throughout the seven regional partnerships to data assimilation, discuss problems, offer suggestions, and helped edit assessments coming out of DOE-NETL in the area of MVA.  Beginning in 2007 and going through 2009, she supported the NMT leaders of the SWP project who took on most of the coordination of the MVA team in the later years of the project. 

Education:

Ph.D., Earth Science, Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California (UC), San Diego

B.A., Environmental Chemistry, UC San Diego

B.S., Biochemistry/Cell Biology, UC San Diego

Selected Publications: