Jane Kathryn Willenbring is an American geomorphologist and professor at Stanford University. She is best known for using cosmogenic nuclides to investigate landscape changes and dynamics. She has won multiple awards including the Antarctica Service Medal and the National Science Foundation CAREER Award.
Early life and education
Willenbring was born on August 2, 1977, to Roys E. and Elaine K. Willenbring. She grew up in Mandan, North Dakota. She developed a curiosity about the landscape and began creating her own small experiments.
Willenbring completed her Bachelor of Science in geosciences/soil science in 1999 at North Dakota State University, where she was McNair Scholar. Willenbring was a graduate student in earth science at Boston University, where she graduated in 2002. In 2006, Willenbring completed her Ph.D. in Earth Sciences at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada. Her thesis investigated glacial erosion in the Arctic and Atlantic Canada using cosmogenic nuclides. Following her Ph.D. work, the National Center for Earth Surface Dynamics awarded Willenbring a Synthesis Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Minnesota. Two years later, in 2008, Willenbring was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellowship at Leibniz University Hannover and GFZ-Potsdam in Germany where she worked until 2010.
Career and research
Following her postdoctoral work in 2010, Willenbring joined the University of Pennsylvania's faculty as an assistant professor in the School of Arts and Sciences' Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences until 2016. Willenbring then became an associate professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego where she was also the director of the Scripps Cosmogenic Isotope Laboratory (SCI-Lab). In 2020, Willenbring became an associate professor at Stanford University.
Willenbring's work focuses on how the earth's surface changes in response to a variety of forces including tectonics, climate, and living organisms. She utilizes high-resolution topographic data, field observations, landscape evolution models, ice sheet models, and geochemical techniques, specifically cosmogenic nuclides, to study the earth's surface. Willenbring is at the forefront of her field and has developed the use of beryllium-9 and cosmogenic beryllium-10 to trace erosion, weathering, and meltwater pulses in order to study and track the changes in Earth's surface.
Willenbring has used some of her cosmogenic nuclide techniques in her research in Antarctica and Puerto Rico. She has dated meltwater pulses in Antarctica during warming periods using the ratio of beryllium-10 to beryllium-9. Willenbring is also a current investigator at the Luquillo Critical Zone Observatory in Puerto Rico where she and her colleagues use beryllium-10, as well as other cosmogenic nuclides, to investigate how Puerto Rico's landscape has affected its biodiversity. Their research has uncovered that nutrient-rich dust travels to Puerto Rico from the Sahara Desert which helps trees to grow in Puerto-Rico's nutrient-poor soil.
In 2016, Willenbring received a National Science Foundation CAREER grant which she will use to study how beryllium isotopes can be used to track land-based sediment. Some of the funds will also be used to continue her citizen science project, "Soil Kitchen".
In addition to Antarctica and Puerto Rico, Willenbring has also conducted research in Canada, and the South Fork Eel River in Northern California.
Awards and honors
2020 American Geophysical Union Earth and Planetary Surface Processes Marguerite Williams Award 2018 Geological Society of America Fellow 2017 UC San Diego Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action and Diversity Award 2016 US National Science Foundation, CAREER Award 2015 Antarctica Service Medal
Willenbring has also received significant funding from the National Science Foundation and the University of Pennsylvania.