Amanda Henck Schmidt
Assistant Professor
Geology Department
Oberlin College
Note: I recently changed my name from Amanda Curry Henck to Amanda Henck Schmidt. Previous research appears under both names.
Yangjuan, Sichuan, China.
Last summer while in the field I blogged for the NY Times Scientist at Work blog. Check it out!
I was featured in the most recent issue of the Fulbright Student Newsletter. The story is about my time in Jiuzhaigou in 2010 as a Fulbright Student Fellow.
In my research I try to use a variety of tools to understand why the surface of Earth looks the way that it does. At the biggest scale, I am interested in how we can learn about what forces shape the landscapes that we see today. My research ranges in scale from small-scale projects that are community driven and aim to understand how people interact with their environments to large-scale projects to understand landscape evolution over million-year timescales
My latest research is driven by two overarching questions:
1) What happens to sediment movement over the landscape when people change the environment?
2) What has shaped the long-term evolution of the landscape of Eastern Tibet?
To conduct this research I use a variety of tools including short-lived radionuclides (which we will be able to process in house after Geology Department renovations in summer 2011), cosmogenic radionuclides, field work, GIS and remote-sensing based landscape analysis, and Chinese sediment data. I collaborate closely with colleagues at a number of universities in geology, geography, anthropology, urban planning, and forest resources departments.
My research is primarily focused in western China. I work on small-scale problems in western and northern Sichuan Province and larger scale problems in eastern Tibet, Yunnan, and western Sichuan. I have a close collaborative relationship with the Archaeology and Environmental Studies departments at Sichuan University, with the International Research Lab at Jiuzhaigou National Park, and with Yangjuan Primary School.
Last update: 8 Sep 2011
Contact me
amanda . schmidt at oberlin . edu
(remove extra spaces and replace at with @)
At work
CARN 404 (office) and 418 (lab)
Phone: 440-775-8342