Travis Drake

Dr. Drake received his PhD in physical environmental sciences in 2019 from Florida State University. His PhD research focused on the carbon biogeochemistry of pristine and agriculturally impacted watersheds of the Congo Basin.

Dr. Drake continued and expanded this line of inquiry as a postdoc in the Sustainable Agroecosystems Group at ETH Zurich, where he helped develop and attain an SNSF Sinergia Grant to study tropical soil erosion in the Kasaï Basin. His current research at ETH Zurich is focused on the effect of agriculture on carbon mobilization in watersheds of the Democratic Republic of Congo. To accomplish this, he uses a variety of analytical tools to characterize both organic and inorganic carbon in streams draining pristine and impacted catchments. These include stable and radiocarbon isotopes, FT-ICR mass spectrometry, fluorescence, uv-visible absorbance, and bioincubations. With these tools Dr. Drake strives to link the isotopic signature of inorganic carbon with potential organic sources. Underpinning this research is an effort to improve methods of capturing whole watershed processes, since a growing body of work has highlighted headwaters as important vents for respired terrestrial carbon dioxide.
Dr. Drake’s overarching scientific interest is how humans are mobilizing carbon to rivers through the perturbation of soils, via both direct (soil disturbance, agriculture, deforestation, land-use change) and indirect (climate change impacts on hydrology, permafrost, etc.) impacts.