Paul Bierman has been a geologist and professor at the University of Vermont since 1993. His research and teaching expertise focus on the interaction of people and Earth’s dynamic surface.
Bierman’s research has taken him around the globe. He has studied erosion in
Australia, South America, and several countries in Africa and the Middle East. In
Greenland, Bierman and his graduate students are tracing the history of the
Greenland Ice sheet over the last million years, an adventure that repeatedly takes
them helicoptering over the ice. In Vermont, New Hampshire, and New York,
Bierman and his students created the first record of storminess and erosion that
extended back over the last 10,000 years.
Bierman works extensively communicating science to the public. He teaches
summer science programs for highly motivated high school students, directs a
public web site (www.uvm.edu/landscape) holding over 70,000 photographs of
historic Vermont landscapes, has been co-author since 2005 of Pipkin et al., an
introductory Environmental Geology textbook, and is the lead author of a new, NSF-
funded textbook, Key Concepts in Geomorphology, that uses extensive visuals and
photographs to teach about the workings of Earth’s surface.
