Rate My Professor Meredith Kelly

Meredith Kelly is Professor of Earth Sciences, Department Chair, and holder of the Frederick Hall Professorship in Mineralogy and Geology at Dartmouth College, where she also serves as Faculty Director of the Dartmouth Climate Collaborative. A leading figure in Geoscience, her research centers on the terrestrial record of past climate change spanning centuries to millions of years. Through glacial geologic studies, Quaternary paleoclimatology, and geomorphology, she reconstructs well-dated histories of glacier and ice sheet extents using techniques such as cosmogenic nuclide surface-exposure dating and analyses of lake and bog sediments. This work elucidates mechanisms driving climate variability, informing contemporary climate dynamics.

Kelly received her B.S. in Geological Sciences and Environmental Studies from Tufts University (1995), M.S. in Quaternary Studies from the University of Maine (1999), and Ph.D. in Geological Sciences from the University of Bern, Switzerland (2003). She joined Dartmouth in 2009 as Assistant Professor, advancing to Associate Professor in 2015 and full Professor in 2022. Previously, she held positions as Doherty Associate Research Scientist and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University (2004-2008) and University Postdoctoral Fellow at The Ohio State University (2003-2004).

Her influential publications include "High-latitude warming initiated the onset of the last deglaciation in the tropics" (Science Advances, 2019, Jackson et al.), "Pronounced summer warming in Northwest Greenland during the Holocene and Last Interglacial" (PNAS, 2018, McFarlin et al.), "Near-constant retreat rate of a terrestrial margin of the Laurentide Ice Sheet during the last deglaciation" (Geology, 2021, Lowell et al.), and recent papers such as "Paleoclimatic implications of glacial fluctuations in the Sierra Nevada del Cocuy, Colombia, during Termination 1" (Quaternary Science Reviews, 2025, Herbert et al.) and "Relative summer temperature changes from glacial fluctuations in the Scoresby Sund Region, Central East Greenland, during late-glacial time" (Quaternary Science Reviews, 2025, Kelly et al.). With over 3,200 citations, her contributions have advanced paleoclimate research globally.