The School of Earth Sciences will begin interviewing candidates this quarter to become faculty for a new program in Geobiology at Stanford, according to Geological and Environmental Sciences professor Jonathan Payne.
Earth Sciences will make a series of hires over the next few years with the help of a newly formed search committee, comprised of faculty from three departments: Geological and Environmental Sciences, Environmental Earth Systems Science and Biology.
“We expect to make three new hires over the next three years (i.e., one per year),” wrote Payne, who is an associate professor in the new program, in an email to The Daily.
According to the 2011-12 budget proposal from the School of Earth Sciences, geobiology is an emerging multidisciplinary field that will be “game changing for the study of the Earth.”
“Geobiology is the study of the co-evolution of Earth and life. It involves a wide range of approaches, from studies of microbe-mineral interactions to the influence of biological activity on the solid Earth, oceans and atmosphere,” Payne said.
The primary challenge for the committee is the scientific breadth of the applicant pool.
“Given such diverse areas of expertise among the applicants, it is challenging [and exciting] to read and evaluate the application materials in order to identify the finalists,” Payne said.
Geobiology will not be a full-fledged department. Professor Pamela Matson, Dean of the School of Earth Sciences, clarified in an email: “We are not starting a new department, but instead hiring several faculty that will form the nucleus of a new, interdisciplinary research and educational initiative in geobiology.”
Because the search committee is still searching for new faculty, it is hard to tell how many new courses would appear with the new program–the courses are dependent on the new faculties’ decisions.
However, according to Payne, it is likely that new introductory classes will be developed primarily on the graduate level, with some undergraduate courses as an option.
Several other peer institutions–MIT, Caltech and USC–have already formed geobiology programs.
But according to Payne, “Few of our competitors have major hiring initiatives in this area at the moment.”
Payne noted that the field of geobiology is just coming to the fore as its own discipline. Paleontology was the precursor to geobiology, he said.
Geobiology differs from paleontology through the emergence of new biological and geological research tools, including genomics, isotope geochemistry and nanoscale characterization of biological and geological materials and processes.
Through such tools, first available in the late 1990s, geobiologists can now investigate phenomena in the biosphere and geosphere.