M. Allison Stegner

I am a conservation paleobiologist, and I study ecological and environmental change over the last 10,000+ years.  My research synthesizes modern, historic, and paleoecologic records to study how species diversity and abundance have changed through time–on local and regional scales–in response to past environmental changes. My field work includes excavation of packrat middens, small mammal mark-recapture surveys, and collection of lake cores to reconstruct past biodiversity and the environment. In the Hadly lab, I am working to define the Anthropocene as a geologic epoch, by studying microfossil and geochemical signals of anthropogenic activity in sediment cores from Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve.

I received my B.S. in biology from Stanford University in 2010 and Ph.D. in integrative biology from the University of California at Berkeley in 2015. I continued on to a postdoc at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with the Abrupt Change in Ecological Systems group, followed by a postdoc at Stanford’s Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve. I am currently a research scientist in the Hadly Lab.