Jonathan Payne
Dorrell William Kirby Professor, Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs, Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment and Professor, by courtesy, of Biology,
Department
Department of Geological Sciences
Ph.D., Harvard University, Earth and Planetary Sciences (2005)
A.M., Harvard University, Earth and Planetary Sciences (2002)
B.A., Williams College, Geosciences (1997)
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.