Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability
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Alex Hedgpeth
Postdoctoral Scholar, Earth System Science
BioAlexandra Hedgpeth is a biogeochemist whose research explores how soil carbon cycling in peatlands responds to environmental change. Her work focuses on understanding the mechanisms that regulate carbon storage and greenhouse gas production in both tropical and boreal wetlands, with a particular emphasis on the vulnerability of deep, ancient carbon to modern surface inputs and hydrologic shifts.
Through her Ph.D. research at the University of California, Los Angeles, Alex has developed and applied novel isotopic and geochemical approaches—including implementing radiocarbon dating, stable isotope analyses, and high-resolution molecular characterization—to trace the sources and fates of carbon in peat soils. Her fieldwork spans a range of ecosystems, from ombrotrophic bogs in the Arctic to saturated tropical peat domes in Central America. This comparative framework allows her to identify unifying controls on carbon preservation and loss across climate zones.
Alex's research integrates field measurements, laboratory experiments, and synthesis of global datasets. She is a key contributor to multi-institutional efforts to model peatland carbon cycling under climate change scenarios, including DOE- and NSF-supported initiatives. Her work helps clarify the role of peatlands as both long-term carbon sinks and potential sources of atmospheric CO₂ and CH₄ under future disturbance.
In addition to her scientific contributions, Alex is committed to collaborative, interdisciplinary research and has worked closely with partners at national laboratories, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, and international data synthesis networks. She is especially interested in questions with high uncertainty and high relevance to climate feedbacks—such as thresholds in biogeochemical function and the persistence of deep soil carbon under hydrologic change. -
Alexander Honeyman
Postdoctoral Scholar, Earth System Science
BioI study environmental systems—with a particular emphasis on (wild)fire—using a mixture of laboratory, field, and data science approaches. Recent scholarship focuses on toxic metals in wildfire smoke, while past efforts have examined post-fire soil recovery through the lens of microbial ecology. Alongside Scott Fendorf, I co-lead SmokeCast—an applied research effort supported by the Sustainability Accelerator at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. At SmokeCast, we develop (wild)fire smoke toxicity forecasts via hybridization of basic science, novel hardware engineering, and artificial intelligence. My work maintains close collaborations with the fire service—which evolved over 10 years while I was a volunteer firefighter/EMT. I actively maintain my national qualification for wildland firefighting (i.e., “red card”) to facilitate wildfire and smoke research.
