Dr. Shoemaker grew up in MA before attending Princeton University. She graduated Magna Cum Laude with a bachelor of arts degree majoring in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. During her time at Princeton, she spent a semester abroad in Panama studying tropical ecology, and completed an undergraduate thesis project studying the potential feedback of vegetation albedo with climate change in an alpine meadow. Her undergraduate thesis research was funded by the Princeton EEB department, and supported in collaboration with Dr. John Harte of Berkeley and the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory where the research was conducted.
After spending two years teaching environmental education to elementary-aged children, first in Washington state (YMCA's Camp Tacoma) and then in Maine (The Chewonki Foundation), Ms. Shoemaker returned to school to pursue a doctorate in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University.
Working primarily with Prof. Dan Schrag, Dr. Shoemaker designed a novel approach to understanding what controls methane (CH4) emissions from terrestrial wetlands and made fundamental discoveries about the mechanisms that control methane fluxes from saturated soil environments (see Shoemaker and Schrag, 2010 and Shoemaker et al. 2012). This work drew heavily upon geochemical techniques, commonly used to study marine sediments, to approach a problem in terrestrial ecology with large implications for quantifying future climate change feedbacks with the methane cycle. In this work, monthly pore water profiles were obtained from Sallie's Fen in Barrington, NH, analyzed for delta 13C-CO2, [CO2] and [CH4] to create a 3-yr timeline. A diffusion-reaction model was then developed to calculate the rates of methane production, methane oxidation, respiration, and transport occurring at each depth in the wetland soil. This work represented the first time that actual in situ methane production and oxidation rates were obtained, with traditional methodologies requiring destructive soil sampling and laboratory incubations to obtain rate measurement. Through this analysis, it was found that the carbon isotope profiles could not account for the magnitude of methane emissions begin released from this wetland, and concluded that over 90% of the CH4 released must be produced in the surface boundary of the wetland, a finding with significant implications for our understanding of methane biogeochemstry and climate feedbacks.