Hope Jahren Biography

Hope Jahren is an American geochemist and geobiologist known for her work using stable isotope analysis to analyze fossil forests dating to the Eocene. She has won many prestigious awards in the field including the James B. Macelwane Medal of the American Geophysical Union. Her book Lab Girl (2016) has been applauded as both a personal memoir and a paean to the natural world and a literary fusion of memoir and science writing.
Jahren was born in Austin Minnesota on September 27 1969. Her father taught science at a community college and she has 3 older brothers. She completed her undergraduate education in geology at the University of Minnesota graduating cum laude in 1991.
Jahren earned her Ph.D in 1996 at the University of California Berkeley in the field of soil science. Her dissertation covered the formation of biominerals in plants and used novel stable isotope methods to examine the processes. From 1996 to 1999 she was an assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology then moved to Johns Hopkins University where she stayed until 2008. At Georgia Tech she conducted pioneering research on paleoatmospheres using fossilized plants and discovered the second methane hydrate release event that occurred 117 million years ago. She also spent a year on a Fulbright Award at the University of Copenhagen learning DNA analysis techniques. While at Johns Hopkins Jahren received media attention for her work with the fossil forests of Axel Heiberg Island. Her studies of the trees allowed her to estimate the environmental conditions on the island 45 million years ago. She and her collaborators analyzed depletion of oxygen isotopes to determine the weather patterns there that allowed large Metasequoia forests to flourish during the Eocene. Her research at Johns Hopkins also included the first extraction and analysis of DNA found in paleosol and the first discovery of stable isotopes existing in a multicellular organism's DNA. Jahren is currently a full professor at the University of Hawaii. Her research there focuses on using stable isotope analysis to determine characteristics of the environment on different timescales.

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