At Sweet Briar College, I have completed a number of different research projects both on and off campus with colleagues and students. My research is rather eclectic but has been focused around the theme of sediment and its environmental significance and effects. I am currently working on a sabbatical project involving enhancing my GIS skills so that I can offer an advanced GIS course. I am applying these new skills to the study of Civil War-era maps of central Virginia, with particular attention being paid to the location of mill dams. The field component of the project will involve visiting several of these sites to investigate how much "legacy sediment" is being retained in floodplains at former dam sites, acting as potential turbidity sources during flood events.

My past projects have included study of the clay mineralogy of stream bank sediment from watersheds with widely different rock types in Virginia and the Carolina Coastal Plain, the effects of small dams on the geomorphology and ecology of low-order streams at SBC, the effects of historical agriculture on soil erosion at SBC, and the effects of land use and land cover on sediment yield in a large reservoir watershed in Vermont. This work has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Jeffress Memorial Trust, and faculty grants from Sweet Briar College; and my papers have been published in journals such as Catena, Northeastern Geology and Environmental Sciences, Southeastern Geology, and Southeastern Geographer. My collaborators have included Beverley Wemple of the Geography Department at the University of Vermont, Dan Druckenbrod at Longwood University, and my husband Dr. Cliff Ambers, who is also a geologist. Students who have done research with me include Sara Rothamel '09, Melanie Stine '06, Anel Avila '06, Medora Hackler '04, Tasha Purcell '04, and Rebecca Lewis '02. Many of these students have presented their work at meetings of the American Geophysical Union and the Geological Society of America.

As an undergraduate, I always had trouble narrowing down my interests.  I originally thought I wanted to be an archaeologist, so I majored in anthropology at Indiana University in Bloomington.  Luckily, I was advised to take some geology classes as background, and I soon found that I was also interested in rocks.  So I picked up a second major in geology; but before long, my tendency towards the physical rather than social sciences won out, and I considered geology to be my future career.  In the summer after my junior year, I spent ten weeks at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History as an intern in the Research Training Program.  There, in addition to seeing the inner workings of a big museum and being dragged through more collections of biological specimens than you can imagine, I got started on a small project with Dr. Michael Wise of the Mineral Sciences department.  His specialty is the mineralogy of pegmatites, and I soon got interested in my project on aplites related to some Maine pegmatites.  That work led to a senior honors thesis on those rocks, which then led to graduate work on aplites at the University of Oklahoma.  I ended up doing a master's thesis which attempted (not very successfully) to model the crystallization of granitic magma to determine the conditions under which mineralogically layered aplites might form.  By the time I was done with my master's degree, I thought I needed a change of scene and research area.

I decided to move to the University of Oregon to pursue the aspect of geology that first fascinated me: surficial processes.  My research shifted into the realm of environmental geology, including lake sedimentation, hydrology, soils, and geomorphology.   My dissertation project involved the watershed of Dorena Lake reservoir.  In addition to being a really interesting recreational area (check out the Row River Trail and the Umpqua Nat'l Forest Cottage Grove District), the lake is a catchment for sediment being eroded out of the watershed.  Very little sediment is carried by the rivers and streams during the summer; but in the winter, the water can be muddy with it.  In my dissertation, I examined (1) how sedimentation in the lake relates to hydrologic events and the logging history of the watershed, (2) how mercury contamination of sediment in Dorena and nearby Cottage Grove Lakes varied over time in relation to local mining history, and (3) how the clay mineralogy of suspended stream sediments from the watershed relates to hydrothermal alteration, the types of landslides that occur, and the development of topography over time.