Associate Professor, Geology & Geophysics LSU Planetary Science Laboratory
Suniti’s planetary science lab group focuses broadly on synthesizing remote sensing data at micro- and macro-scales tocharacterize geological processes. Related works, with a martian emphasis, span topics such as regional soil hydration and weathering; pathways of halogen volatility; subglacial melting from geothermal fluxes, etc. Computational applications of segmenting planetary soil images and multivariate hierarchical regression underlie such works. Analog field sites include a putative impact site in Louisiana and the serpentine zone in Sri Lanka. The latter is an emerging collaboration with Lankan research institutions, where Dr. Perl’s expertise will illuminate key habitability aspects including Fe-oxidizing microbial mats in associated springs.