David Hanson

Bio

My research interests center on photosynthesis, carbon metabolism, water use efficiency (carbon captures/water lost), and stress physiology in a wide range of organisms including cyanobacteria, micro and macroalgae, bryophytes, gymnosperms, and flowering plants in both natural and agricultural settings. The stable isotope aspects of my research focus on non-traditional applications involving real-time exchange of natural abundance and lightly enriched isotopologues with photosynthetic tissues in order to understand organism function in a wide range of environmental conditions. The workhorse for these analyses is a coupled system that I developed, using a tunable diode laser (Campbell Scientific) to sub-sample from a gas exchange system (LICOR). This system collects data at 10Hz and when averaged over 10s it has a precision better than 0.1 per mil for ¹³CO₂/¹²CO₂. In addition, I have used membrane inlet mass spectrometry for a wider range of molecules (primarily CO₂ and O₂) and we will be expanding this work over the next two years.