Welcome to Megan’s world of geophysics!  I am the resident geophysicist in the Geology Department at Colorado College.

My undergraduate degree is in geology…therefore my brand of geophysics is strongly flavored with traditional geologic approaches.  As my students often hear me say, if you remove the “geo” from “geophysics”, you have simply physics.  The wide variety of teaching and research avenues I pursue reflects my philosophy that the strongest science is interdisciplinary.  I tend to “walk the line” between geophysics and geology because it allows me to effectively understand and apply a variety of constraints to any given problem in the geosciences.  I also like to apply many different types of geophysical approaches to any given problem for the same reasons.  I feel lucky to be at a liberal arts college like CC, where I can bring the wide variety of approaches I use in research to my students in the classroom and offer them an array of different research experiences!

My research tends to migrate towards problems and topics centered on better understanding tectonics, including Earth structure, kinematics of rocks in the subsurface, and the dynamics of driving forces for plate tectonics.  I’m most interested in understanding the structure and dynamics of active and recently active tectonic areas (< 50 Ma), but have taken brief forays into applications of seismology for verification of nuclear testing and more recently, structure of cratonic regions.  Like many CC Geology majors, I love to be in the field, so most of my research projects and geophysics classes involve collection of data (both geologic and geophysical) in the field.  Please see my teaching, advising, and research pages for additional insights into my interests in geophysics and geology.