Rate My Professor Marissa Betts

Dr. Marissa Betts is a Senior Lecturer in Earth Sciences in the School of Environmental and Rural Science at the University of New England, Armidale, Australia. She holds a PhD from Macquarie University, completed in 2016, where her doctoral research examined early Cambrian shelly fossils from South Australia and their biostratigraphic applications for dating rocks. As a geologist and invertebrate palaeontologist, Betts investigates some of the earliest complex skeletons in the fossil record, dating to approximately 510 million years ago from South Australia. Her research interests encompass early Cambrian chronostratigraphy and timescale calibration, biostratigraphy, Cambrian palaeobiology and palaeoecology, and the integration of fossils with U-Pb geochronology and chemostratigraphy. She is affiliated with the Palaeoscience Research Centre and LithoLab at UNE, contributing to studies on the Cambrian Explosion, global palaeogeography, and the rise of animals.

Betts has advanced understanding of Cambrian biostratigraphy through key publications, including 'A new lower Cambrian shelly fossil biostratigraphy for South Australia' (Betts et al., 2017, Gondwana Research), 'Early Cambrian (Stage 4) brachiopods from the Shipai Formation of South China' (Duan et al., 2021), and 'The quest for an Australian Cambrian stage scale' (Laurie et al., 2024, Alcheringa). She has received the Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award, the A.H. Voisey Medal from the Geological Society of Australia in 2021, the Tall Poppy Science Award in 2021, and was named a Superstar of STEM in 2020. Betts serves as Secretary of the International Subcommission on Cambrian Stratigraphy. She engages in science communication through public seminars, such as the Life, Earth & Environment Seminar Series on sieving tiny fossils for big stories, and short films like 'ROLA (Stone)' exploring geoscience and cultural connections. At UNE, she teaches geology units, supervises honours and PhD students, and leads the BETTS Lab.