Academic Credentials
  • Ph.D., Biology, University of Southern California, 2016
  • B.A., Biology, Washington University in St. Louis, 2008
Professional Honors
  • National Science Foundation, (NSF) East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes Fellow, 2014
Professional Affiliations
  • American Geophysical Union (AGU)
  • American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

Dr. Momper specializes in aquatic geochemistry, microbiology, and water resources. She conducted her doctoral and postdoctoral research studying the chemistry and biology of groundwater systems using field- and laboratory-based analytical tools to detect and quantify chemicals and nutrients associated with minerals, fluids, natural waters, and gases. 

Dr. Momper uses her expertise to aid clients in matters of regulatory compliance, state water quality regulations, and litigation involving Natural Resources Damages (NRD). She has also assisted clients in matters of sustainability, soil health, soil water and carbon holding capacity, and implemented innovative solutions to improve clients' drought resilience.

In various terrestrial and aquatic environments she has studied occurrence and fate of iron, manganese, lithium, copper, arsenic, carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur and trace gases such as methane, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and nitric and nitrous oxide. She has utilized these measurements to model and predict chemical transformations, energetic yield, and bioavailability of chemical species, thereby understanding complex microbiological controls on the fate and transport of nutrients, contaminants, and trace gases and elements. Dr. Momper also has expertise in bacterial genome DNA sequencing. By reconstructing environmental bacterial genomes and metabolic pathways she can predict microbially mediated consumption and transformation of nutrients such as ammonium, nitrate, nitrite, phosphate, carbon dioxide, halogenated compounds and various sulfur bearing species.

Dr. Momper has coordinated and participated in numerous open ocean and land-based field sampling expeditions in remote locations such as the central Pacific Ocean, the Western Coast of Australia, and in mining facilities as deep as 5,000 feet underground. In these studies, she examined marine cyanobacteria blooms, coastal microbial ecology, and changes in groundwater geochemistry and microbiology as a function of depth and host geology.  Before joining Exponent Dr. Momper was the W. O. Crosby Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a NASA Postdoctoral Scholar at Northwestern University. In these positions, she researched microbial ecology in marine and freshwater coastal systems such as the Indian and Pacific Oceans and Lake Michigan.  Dr. Momper has collaborated with national and international agencies, such as NASA's Mars 2020 Mission and the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC). She has designed and taught both field-based and laboratory classes in environmental microbiology, ecology, and marine microbiology. Dr. Momper has authored or co-authored over thirty conference presentations, including invited talks, and published over a dozen papers in peer reviewed journals.