Introducing Dr. Courtney Wagner
Dr. Wagner received her Ph.D. from the University of Utah and spent three years as a Peter Buck Postoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History designing and conducting independent research.
Her research program aims to delineate the detection and environmental information encoded by magnetofossils, the fossil remains of iron biomineralizing organisms. She pairs modern analog studies and paleoenvironmental reconstructions from magnetofossils to decipher how coastal ecosystems are affected by climate change. Her work demonstrates how magnetofossils ‘remotely’ assess spatial and temporal changes in ocean chemistry and biodiversity in vulnerable coastal environments. This work is applicable to a wide range of researchers studying climate change and planetary habitability.
This semester Dr. Wagner will be teaching Earth and Life Through Time, one of our CORE lectures that explores major events in the history of Earth, including mass extinctions, Snowball Earth hypothesis, birth and death of oceans, growth of continents, explosion of life, dinosaurs and the inter-relatedness of earth and life process.