- Royce Fellowship
Concentration
Award Year
Colleen will use earthquake waves to locate and model the subducted Farallon slab, a fragment of the Earth's hard outer shell that sunk more than 1,500 kilometers into the Earth and now lies beneath eastern North America. She hopes to illuminate how solid rock flows and circulates throughout the Earth's deep interior.
Colleen is an Assistant Professor in Geology at Brown. She graduated with a Sc.B. in Geology/Physics/Math from Brown University. After working in environmental consulting for two years, she entered graduate school and received a Ph.D. from Harvard in 2007. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (Columbia University) from 2007-2008 and became an assistant professor at Boston University in 2008. Colleen has joined the faculty in the Department of Geological Sciences at Brown. Her research examines three-dimensional variations in the temperature, composition, partial-melt content, and volatile abundance of Earth’s mantle. Colleen first pursued her research in seismology during her Royce Fellowship in 1999. She now has an office just two doors away from her Royce Faculty Sponsor, Professor Karen Fisher. Colleen is a mom to toddler Oliver and occasionally dusts off her cello to play in community orchestras.