Following her Ph.D. work at Princeton, Hastings became a postdoctoral fellow at the
University of Washington in the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean Department of Atmospheric Sciences (JISAO). After completing her postdoctoral work in 2008, Hastings joined the faculty at
Brown University as an assistant professor in the Department of Geological Sciences and Environmental Change Initiative. Hastings became an associate professor of earth, environmental and planetary sciences at Brown University in 2015 and was promoted to professor in 2020. She was the deputy director of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society between 2020 and 2023. Hastings’ work focuses around the reactive
nitrogen cycle and using nitrate deposition to see how human activity impacts atmospheric composition. This includes data from a variety of sources such as seawater nitrate levels, freshwater nitrate levels, and
ice core nitrate levels. Using this data her studies have come to conclusions about how human activities and environmental responses interact to explain how the climate changes. The Earth Science Women's Network is a member-driven organization which has had several prominent creations since its inception. In 2014 the ESWN created the Promoting Geoscience, Research, Education and Success (PROGRESS) initiative which focused on determining the role same-gender mentoring on the retention of women in the geosciences. The initiative was funded by a
National Science Foundation (NSF) grant. In 2017, Hastings and the ESWN partnered with the
Association for Women Geoscientists and the
American Geophysical Union to launch the ADVANCEGeo Partnership. The partnership seeks to address the issue of sexual harassment in the earth, space and environmental sciences and was also funded by a NSF grant. Hastings was also the recipient of the Atmospheric Sciences Ascent Award, which the
American Geophysical Union awarded her in 2014. The award is designed to recognize research by mid-career scientists in the fields of atmospheric and climate sciences. She was recognized for her work modeling aerosol properties and their impacts on the atmosphere. Hastings was also recognized with a
CAREER award from the
National Science Foundation in 2014 supporting her work studying where the nitrous oxide in the atmosphere is being emitted from. The project is entitled
Quantifying the Isotopic Signature of Nitrogen Oxides Emissions Sources. Publications Hastings' work has been published in several scientific journals, including
Science, The Journal of Geophysical Research, Environmental Science & Technology, and Analytical Chemistry. Her most cited publications are listed below: • KL Casciotti, DM Sigman, MG Hastings, JK Böhlke, A Hilker (2002) Measurement of the oxygen isotopic composition of nitrate in seawater and freshwater using the denitrifier method. Analytical Chemistry, 74 (19), 4905-4912 • MG Hastings, JC Jarvis, EJ Steig (2009) Anthropogenic impacts on nitrogen isotopes of ice-core nitrate. Science, 324 (5932), 1288-1288 • B Alexander, MG Hastings, DJ Allman, J Dachs, JA Thornton, SA Kunasek (2009) Quantifying atmospheric nitrate formation pathways based on a global model of the oxygen isotopic composition (Δ 17 O) of atmospheric nitrate. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, 9 (14), 5043-5056
Awards and recognition • 2014, Atmospheric Sciences Ascent Award, American Geophysical Union == References ==