Researcher of the Month

Dr. Alison Anders

Alison Anders, a new assistant professor in Geology, and CWACES affiliate, has just arrived in Champaign with her husband, Jonathan Tomkin, who will also be affiliated with CWACES. Dr. Anders is passionate about her subject, stemming from her original curiosities on the glacial history of Minnesota, where she is from originally. Dr. Anders comes to the University of Illinois with an undergraduate degree in both Geology and Mathematics from Carleton College, and her graduate degrees from the University of Washington, where she received her Ph.D. in 2005. Most recently, she was a Richard Foster Flint post-doctoral fellow at Yale University.

Dr. Anders brings a wealth of research and geographical experience to her position at Illinois. For her Master’s degree, she examined chemical and physical weathering in the Copper River basin, Alaska, using water chemistry techniques. Subsequently, her Ph.D. work concentrated on the spatial patterns of precipitation and the relationships of these patterns to landscape evolution, with study areas located in the far eastern Himalayas and in the Olympic Mountains, Washington. By using precipitation data obtained from gauging stations and remote sensing, as well as numerical weather forecasting, she developed and calibrated a simple orographic precipitation model. This model was coupled with a numerical landscape evolution model to investigate the co-evolution of precipitation patterns and topography.

After completing her Ph.D., Dr. Anders pursued research on stable isotopes and precipitation processes, with field areas in northern California and the Olympic Mountains while in residence at Yale. Scientists often utilize paleorecords of isotopes stored in soils and carbonates to reconstruct past landscape history. In her research, Dr. Anders wanted to examine, in detail, how isotopes operate in present-day environments, so that we have an improved understanding for their use in the reconstruction of historical landscapes.

Now, at Illinois, Dr. Anders is enthusiastically charting her research course! This summer, she is co-leading an NSF project which allows 9 undergraduate geology students to go to the European Alps to collect data that they can use in pursuing their senior theses. This is a region where extreme precipitation events occur in deeply and rapidly exhumed metamorphic core rock, and the project allows for examination of the interaction between the precipitation events and geology. Dr. Anders is also involved in a project to study the interaction between meteorology and geomorphology in India’s Western Ghats. In the future, she wants to continue pursuing her interests in the interactions between atmospheric and geomorphic processes, and wishes to tap into the knowledge base that is present among the researchers within CWACES. Utilizing this framework, she would eventually like to pursue research locally, including collaboration with the fluvial research community. She would also like to come full circle by examining aspects of the glacial history of Illinois. Dr. Anders is very enthusiastic about her involvement with CWACES, and the opportunities that it provides for interdisciplinary research, which she indicated is already happening at the University of Illinois.