Degree: Ph.D. in Geosciences
Thesis title: “Rock strength and sediment controls on bedrock river incision in the Taiwan Central Range”
Adviser: Roman DiBiase
Dr. Carr began her graduate work in the fall of 2017, coming to Penn State after completing her Sc. B in Geology-Chemistry from Brown University and working as a GIS technician for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. During her time at Penn State, Carr was the recipient of numerous departmental awards, including the Parizek, Hiroshi and Koya Ohmoto, Alley Family, Scholten-Williams Wright, Chevron, and Shell Fellowships. Additionally, she was recognized for her research and teaching through the 2022 Deines Lecture and the 2021 College of Earth and Mineral Sciences George Schenck Teaching Assistant of the Year. Carr also was awarded the NASA Data Visualization and Storytelling Competition Grand Prize at the Fall 2019 AGU meeting.
For her graduate research, Dr. Carr used drones to map river corridors in the rugged canyons of the Taiwan Central Range at centimeter resolution over scales of tens of kilometers. Through multiple field seasons, Carr conducted repeat surveys of river reaches to track the mobility of car-sized boulders in river channels. The resulting dataset provides an incredible window into how rivers in rapidly uplifting mountain ranges erode, and she is using these datasets to better understand feedbacks between tectonics, rock strength, and erosion. Carr also was engaged in research aimed at understanding the effectiveness of immersive virtual reality field trips in geosciences and developed new teaching materials for the undergraduate Geosciences curriculum at Penn State.
Dr. Carr completed her PhD in Geosciences at Penn State in summer 2022 and is currently a postdoc in the River Dynamics Lab at Simon Fraser University.