Earth & Environmental Sciences

Our department brings together an array of talented faculty with diverse skills and research specialties, who collectively contribute to our understanding of the natural world and whose work helps address the complex environmental issues we face today, at both local and global levels. A fundamental difference between our work and those in more traditional STEM disciplines - such as chemistry, biology or physics -  is that our work has local and global environmental implications and often involves working in natural settings in addition to laboratories. We prepare undergraduate and graduate students for exciting and rewarding careers in the private sector, public sector or in academia. 

Image: A colony of honeypot ants. These fascinating creatures live in seasonally arid environments with periods of abundant and scarce resources. The swollen “replete” ant stores sugar rich foods for the colony to subsist upon when outside resources become scarce.

Prof Lily Khadempour has recently received a prestigious award from the National Science Foundation to establish honeypot ant colonies (and their associated micro-organisms) as a model system for studying microbiome-niche specialization relationships.