Emily Geyman is a Stanford science fellow in the Department of Geophysics and will join the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) as an assistant professor in 2028. She studies how landscapes respond to environmental change and how their response in turn influences the global carbon cycle. Her research uses natural experiments preserved in modern landscapes to understand processes that unfold over centuries to millennia.
As a Hertz Fellow at Caltech, she investigated how Arctic river migration creates floodplains that record the intertwined histories of vegetation, permafrost and soil carbon, providing new constraints on how warming may alter terrestrial carbon storage. At Stanford, she is studying how meltwater drainage beneath the Greenland ice sheet regulates ice motion and its response to warming.
Geyman earned her bachelor’s degree in geosciences from Princeton University and her PhD from Caltech. Between degrees, she spent two years studying glaciers in Arctic Norway as a Daniel M. Sachs Global Scholar. Through the Hertz Fellowship in Global Health and Development, she also worked at the Gates Foundation to develop satellite-based methods for measuring crop yields.
