Rate My Professor Sarah Boulton

Professor Sarah Boulton is Professor of Geohazards in the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Plymouth. She completed her PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 2006, researching the tectono-stratigraphic development of the Hatay Graben in southern Turkey, a deforming plate boundary zone between the Arabian, African, and Anatolian Plates. This work produced the first models for the tectono-sedimentary evolution of a Neogene Graben there, with implications for regional plate tectonics and Neotethys closure. Boulton joined the University of Plymouth in January 2006 as Lecturer in Neotectonics, advancing to Associate Professor of Active Neotectonics in August 2018 and Professor of Geohazards in August 2024. She holds administrative roles as Associate Head of School for Student Recruitment and Marketing from August 2019 to July 2025 and Deputy Head of School since 2020. She co-founded the Girls into Geoscience programme in 2014, an annual workshop for female A-level students that won the Geological Society RH Worth Award in 2018 and has engaged over 1,000 participants.

Boulton's research expertise lies in geohazards and tectonic geomorphology, investigating how earthquakes, landslides, tsunamis, and tectonic processes shape landscapes across timescales using field data, remote sensing, GIS, geospatial analysis, and landscape evolution modelling. Current projects encompass earthquake-induced landslides via a NERC Pushing the Frontiers Grant developing the ShallowLandslider model coupling landscape and earthquake rupture simulations; the NERC-funded EXCESS project cataloguing landslides across earthquake cycles in six global regions; EEFIT fieldwork on the 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquakes, producing datasets on surface rupture, liquefaction, and landslides; and the Gediz Graben in western Turkey as a laboratory for faulting and erosion. She held a Leverhulme Trust International Fellowship in New Zealand post-2016 Kaikōura earthquake. Key publications include 'Structural and geomorphological constraints on the activity of the Sparta Fault (Greece)' (2024, Journal of the Geological Society); 'A coastal risk analysis for the outermost small islands of Indonesia: a multiple natural hazards approach' (2025, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction); 'Earthquake environmental effects and ESI 2007 of the 6th February 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquakes' (2025, Quaternary International); 'Geomorphic Response to Differential Uplift: River Long Profiles in the Gediz Graben, Western Turkey' (2020, Frontiers in Earth Science); and 'The Neogene–Recent Hatay Graben, South Central Turkey: graben formation in a setting of oblique extension (transtension) related to postcollisional tectonic escape' (2008, Geological Magazine). Her contributions advance disaster prediction and support UN Sustainable Development Goals in education, infrastructure, and sustainable communities.