Researcher of the Month

Dr. Jonathan Tomkin

Jonathan Tomkin recently arrived at the University of Illinois as the Associate Director of Academic Affairs for the School of Earth, Society, and Environment (SESE), and as Assistant Professor of Research in the Department of Geology. Jonathan is also one of the faculty CWACES affiliates.

Dr. Tomkin hails from Australia, receiving his bachelor degree with honors, 1st class, in Physics, at the University of Melbourne in 1996, followed by his Ph.D. in Earth Sciences from Australian National University in 2002. His thesis at Melbourne was entitled “An analysis of the two nucleon effective interaction in 20Ne at 135 Mev.” His undergraduate experience, however, showed him how interesting Earth science was, and subsequently, his Ph.D. thesis was “Landforming Processes in Glaciated Orogens: A Numerical Study,” in which Dr. Tomkin wrote a computer model for landscape evolution. After completion of his Ph.D., Dr. Tomkin moved to the United States, where he was a Damon Wells Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at Yale University from 2000-2002. He was then an Assistant Professor at Louisiana State University until arriving at Illinois in 2006. In this short time, Dr. Tomkin has accumulated numerous funded research and education projects, peer reviewed publications, and teaching awards to his name.

Dr. Tomkins’ research program has focused on quantifying Earth processes using a combination of analytical and theoretical methods, while also heavily relying on statistical confidence intervals in testing hypotheses. Since completion of his Ph.D., Jonathan has been adding more field observational data to his modeling work. Recently, Dr. Tomkin traveled to the Patagonian Andes where he collected rock samples for processing the thermochronological data they contain to help define the interaction between surface processes and tectonics in active mountain building regions. Field data for this same purpose was also collected from the Olympic Mountains of Washington State, and from the Southern Alps of New Zealand. Dr. Tomkin has also had field sites in the Clearwater River (Washington State), Antarctica dry valleys, and the Garonne River (France) for the collection of geomorphological and geochemical data to utilize for ground truthing climate histories and geomorphological process models.

Now at Illinois, Dr. Tomkin intends to pursue the research that he began in mountainous locales. However, he aims to extend his research into larger continental-scale projects, such as examining the theoretical predictions of sedimentation patterns on Illinois glaciation. And, next year, Jonathan will travel to the coast of Antarctica, where he will collect sea bottom cores offshore. These will be processed to test some research hypotheses on how the ice sheets there expand and retreat on millennial time scales. He is hoping to demonstrate a particular sedimentationpattern with the growth/retreat cycles to allow for prediction for today.

Jonathan is pleased to be affiliated with CWACES, indicating that water is a unifying feature in landscape evolution research. One challenge presently facing the research community is to extend the behavior of water to spatial and temporal scales beyond the scope of simple analytical solutions. This will require perspectives from multiple fields to accomplish, which is aided by the framework of CWACES. As the lead academic advisor for SESE, Dr. Tomkin foresees the educational benefits of a unifying research structure to study water, as it provides a unifying theme for the Earth system, which is important for science, policymaking, and for social studies.