Jonathan Payne

I received my B.A. in Geosciences from Williams College in 1997. After graduation, I spent two years working as a high school math and science teacher. I then returned to graduate school, earning my Ph.D. in Earth and Planetary Sciences from Harvard University in the spring of 2005. Following a post-doctoral fellowship at Penn State, I joined the faculty at Stanford University in the fall of 2005. My research addresses the relationship between environmental change and biological evolution in the fossil record, with a focus on mass extinction events and long-term trends in the ecological structure of marine ecosystems. I teach courses for undergraduates in historical geology and invertebrate paleobiology and courses for graduate students in carbonate sedimentology, geobiology, and paleobiology.