She'll have to step down from a couple of other administrative posts, but Pamela Matson, the new dean of the School of Earth Sciences, won’t be walking away from any of her research projects. She’ll continue to study land-use changes in Mexico’s Yaqui Valley, and she’ll keep collecting data in Hawaii on the effects of anthropogenic (human-influenced) agents such as acid rain.
After all, Matson points out, she’ll be shepherding “a small school, with fewer than 50 faculty, and a very collegial school.” She succeeds Lynn Orr, ’69, who stepped down after eight years as dean to lead the Global Climate and Energy Project (see Donations).
As the newly named Burton J. and Deedee McMurtry University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, Matson, 49, also plans to continue teaching freshman seminars and doing some lecturing. A biogeochemist who studies the processes that link physical systems —bedrock, soils and water—with biological systems, Matson earned her doctorate in forest ecology from Oregon State University in 1983. Before joining the Stanford faculty in 1997, she was a professor of ecosystem science at UC-Berkeley. She is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences, and a 1995 MacArthur “genius” grant recipient.
For the past two years, Matson directed the popular undergraduate interdisciplinary program in earth systems, which the Faculty Senate last winter renewed for eight years, instead of the typical five. “I think the program is so successful because people recognize how important it is for our future, given that environmental problems are not simple and straightforward,” she says. “They require people who can think in many dimensions, who can understand all sides of an issue and who don’t assume that there’s a good guy and a bad guy.”
Last year, Matson helped launch the interdisciplinary graduate program in environment and resources. As dean, she plans to strengthen the school’s computational geosciences, which enable students to use remote sensing, geostatistical analyses and mathematical modeling to study earth processes.
And in her downtime? Matson and her husband, biological sciences professor Peter Vitousek, head to their second home in Hawaii with their children, Mat, 14, and Liana, 7. With all those intriguing new soils and substrates forming from hot lava, it’s hard to tear herself away from collecting data, but Matson also investigates hiking and snorkeling.
