Rate My Professor Elizabeth Thomas

Thomas leads field expeditions in the Arctic to investigate ice sheet dynamics and vegetation responses to warming and altered precipitation. She spearheaded the development of the UB Carbon Reduction Challenge, a project-based course partnering with the university's Office of Sustainability, where students collaborate with local organizations to measure and mitigate carbon emissions. In 2021, she received the NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, valued at $799,869, to study ancient climate histories in the Great Lakes region through sediment analysis and to expand her educational initiatives, including paid internships with minority-owned businesses. Her influential publications include "Recent warming reverses long-term Arctic cooling" published in Science in 2009, "A global database of Holocene paleotemperature records" in Scientific Data in 2020, and "Rate of mass loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet will exceed Holocene values this century" in Nature in 2020. With over 3,400 citations on Google Scholar, her contributions have significantly advanced paleoclimate research, including global databases such as the Iso2k database. Thomas teaches courses such as ERT 102: Climate Change, ERT 308: Introduction to Geochemistry, and ERT 453/553: Quaternary Dating and Paleoclimate.