Feifei Zhang, Nanjing University, China

2024 Houtermans Award medallist

Feifei Zhang (张飞飞) is a full-time professor in isotope geochemistry and historical geobiology at Nanjing University. A Chinese raised in Xiaogan City, Hubei Province, Feifei completed his bachelor studies at the China University of Geosciences (Wuhan), his M.Sc. degree in Isotope Geochemistry at the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences under the guidance of Prof. Xiang-kun Zhu (2014), and his Ph.D. degree in Geological Sciences at the Arizona State University working with Prof. Ariel Anbar (2018). Feifei then spent two years at Yale University and the University of Copenhagen doing postdoctoral research with Profs. Noah Planavsky and Tais Dahl before returning to China.

Feifei’s research interests broadly lie in combining isotopic tracers with numerical models to study the complex interactions between Earth’s climatic and environmental systems and the evolution of life. He is studying paleoenvironmental change in carbonates by applying the Li, Ca, and Sr isotope systems to track continental weathering, the Ba and Zn isotope systems to track marine productivity, and the Fe, U, Ce, and Tl isotope systems to track marine redox. To do so, Feifei is running a cutting-edge metal geochemistry lab at Nanjing University equipped with a Neptune XT MC-ICP-MS, an Element XR HR-ICP-MS, an Agilent 8900 ICP-MS, an iCAP Pro ICP-OES, and a 120 square-meter clean laboratory.

Feifei’s major contribution in his early career has been to apply and test the carbonate U-isotope proxy to paleoceanic systems of multiple geologic epochs, demonstrating its robustness as a global-ocean redox indicator, which represents a seminal advance in paleoceanographic studies. Work in progress, funded by the National Science Foundation of China and in collaboration with Profs. Shu-zhong Shen (paleontologist), Yi-gang Xu (geochemist), and Alexandre Pohl and Benjamin Mills (modelers), is aimed at coupling geochemical proxy data with Earth-system models to understand how life and its planetary environments have co-evolved through the Paleozoic-Mesozoic transition in a quantitative manner.

Additional information and a list of publications can be found here.