Tobias Wren works on paleoceanography: reconstructing the state of the ocean in the past from what settled to the bottom and stayed there. A core pulled from the shelf carries a record in its layering, its chemistry and the microfossils it contains, and the work is in deciding how much of that record is signal.
His recent attention has been on the last interglacial, roughly 125,000 years ago, when the climate was somewhat warmer than today and sea level was several meters higher. A core recovered in 2024 from a basin off the shelf edge has a section from that period preserved better than anything the group had previously worked with. It disagrees, in an interesting way, with the regional picture that had been assembled from shallower sites.
Wren is careful to distinguish between the core disagreeing with the picture and the core being right. He has published one paper on it and describes the second as "still arguing with itself."
He teaches GEOL 260 Sedimentology and GEOL 470 Paleoceanography, and runs the core laboratory. He takes graduate students in paleoceanography and sedimentology, and has a standing offer to any undergraduate willing to spend a semester describing core sections, which he admits is not a large field of applicants.