Rate My Professor Amelia Shevenell

Amelia Shevenell is a Professor of Geological Oceanography in the College of Marine Science at the University of South Florida. She earned her Ph.D. in Marine Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2004, with a dissertation on the role of climate feedbacks in the middle Miocene climate transition. She also holds an M.Sc. in Marine Science from the same institution in 2001 and a B.A. in Geological Sciences from Hamilton College in 1996. Following her doctorate, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Program on Climate Change at the University of Washington School of Oceanography in 2005. From 2007 to 2011, she served as a Lecturer in the Departments of Geography and Earth Sciences at University College London. She joined the University of South Florida faculty as an Assistant Professor in 2011, advancing to Associate Professor in 2017 and full Professor thereafter. Dr. Shevenell maintains an active sea-going research program, participating in multiple International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) expeditions and serving on IODP advisory panels.

Dr. Shevenell's research generates high-resolution geochemical and micropaleontological records from marine sediments to investigate Earth's climate evolution over the past 65 million years. Her work addresses Antarctic ice sheet development over the last 50 million years using far-field and proximal records, the role of high-latitude oceans in glacial-interglacial carbon cycling, and Antarctic Holocene climate variability. Employing techniques such as stable isotopes in microfossils, trace elements in biogenic calcite, lipid biomarkers, and sedimentology, her studies inform IPCC concerns on polar ice melting and sea level rise. Key publications include Gulick et al. (2017), 'Initiation and long-term instability of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet' in Nature; Gray et al. (2018), 'Deglacial upwelling, productivity, and CO2 in the North Pacific Ocean' in Nature Geoscience; and Smith et al. (2018), 'New species from the Sabrina Flora' in Palynology. She has received the AGU Outstanding Reviewer award (2016), election to The Oceanography Society governing council as Geological Oceanography Counselor (2019), full membership in Sigma Xi (2019), and a USF Faculty Outstanding Research Achievement Award (2019). Additional honors include serving as IODP Distinguished Lecturer (2014-2015) and Associate Editor for Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology (2020-present).