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Robin "Rob" Ericson (74) talks to his brother-in-law Clayton "Clay" Nichols (83) about Clay's Army service and his career as a geoscientist.

Kathy Cashman, professor at the University of Bristol, worked on the 1980 eruption at Mount St. Helen’s in Washington, one of the first monitored volcanic eruptions in the world (“it was a ‘who’s who’ of volcanology and geology”). Thanks to...

Melissa Scruggs is currently working towards earning her PhD in Volcanology at UC Santa Barbara, and there's nothing else in the world she would rather be doing. But she didn't always know this- after dropping out of high school to...

From a childhood filled with archeology lessons from his dad, to graduate studies measuring gases from active volcanoes, and then designing early warning systems to detect volcanic activity, Dr. Florian Schwandner's life goal has been to make a difference in...

Elizabeth Schaeffer hasn’t followed the most straight-forward route into the geosciences but that’s allowed her to discover the field she most wants to study. She’s a non-traditional undergraduate studying applied geology and talks about recent internships she’s done that have...

For the last 14 years, Gari Mayberry has put her volcanology background to work as a disaster response coordinator at USAID. Disasters come in many shapes and sizes so that specialty is a start, but often Gari finds herself connecting...

Jacob Bleacher has spent a great deal of time preparing for Mars and the moon, even though he has never left the Earth’s orbit. The research scientist at Goddard Space Flight Center is currently on detail at NASA Headquarters as...

Rachel Hampton ended up in the geosciences because she couldn’t find the art history class she was looking for. From asking a TA if she could join him on fieldwork to doing her senior thesis on volcanoes without a professor...

The only interviewee to describe her chosen field as a “hoot,” Sonja Behnke, Los Alamos National Laboratory, has been actively involved in atmospheric electricity research since 2008. Before that, she was a math instructor as an AmeriCorps volunteer. As a...

As an associate professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences and volcanologist at Denison University, Erik Klemetti works on volcanoes all over the planet, from Chile to New Zealand to the Cascades of Oregon and California. His research focusses on how...