The Oklahoma State University Boone Pickens School of Geology welcomes Dr. Timothy W. Lyons to campus on Friday, April 1 at 12:30 p.m. inside Room 108 of the Noble Research Center. The world-renowned biogeochemist will present his lecture titled, “Alternative Earths? What Our Planet’s History May Tell Us About Life in the Universe.”
Lyons is a Distinguished Professor of Biogeochemistry in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of California, Riverside, where he has been on the faculty since 2005. Dr. Lyons’ primary research themes are astrobiology, marine geochemistry, geobiology, biogeochemical cycles through time, and Earth history and paleoclimatology. His career-long interests in anoxic marine environments, early atmospheric oxygenation, and co-evolving life have inspired the development and refinement of diverse geochemical tracers in modern settings for exploration of the ancient ocean and atmosphere and the search for life beyond Earth.
Dr. Lyons is a fellow of the Geological Society of America and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award. He has been a visiting scholar at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Sea Research, the University of Queensland, the University of Tasmania (Comet Fellow, 2010), the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology (Hanse-Wissenschafts-Kolleg Fellow, 2007-2008), Cambridge University (Leverhulme Visiting Professorship, 2011), the Institute of Geology and Geophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (2012), the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (2013), Rhodes University in South Africa (Hugh Kelly Research Fellow, 2014), and Yale University (Visiting Fellow, 2015). He was the first Agassiz Lecturer at Harvard University and a recipient of the William T. Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence at the University of Missouri.
Dr. Lyons has served on numerous steering and organizing committees, including service to the Goldschmidt Conference of the Geochemical Society, the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, and funding panels spanning four programs within the National Science Foundation (NSF) and four within the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). He is chair of the Geochemistry Committee of the Petroleum Research Fund of the American Chemical Society and works frequently with international funding agencies, including long-standing membership in the College of Reviewers of the Canada Research Chairs Program. He was previously a member of two research teams within the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) and has helped steer the new NASA Astrobiology Roadmap. He is leader of the new ‘Alternative Earths’ NAI team at UC Riverside and a member of the NAI Executive Council. Dr. Lyons was also a member of the U.S. National Research Council Committee on New Research Opportunities in the Earth Sciences at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NROES, a 2012 decadal report).
Dr. Lyons has served in ten editorial positions, including a long-standing affiliation with Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta and recent service to Global Biogeochemical Cycles and Earth and Planetary Science Letters, and he has served on advisory boards with the American Geological Union and Cambridge University Press. He is active within the Agouron Institute and the Southern California geobiology community. He has also co-organized 22 symposia at international conferences and co-organized and/or participated in 31 workshops (NSF, NASA, etc.) and has given almost 100 invited lectures in addition to those at conferences since 2005.
Dr. Lyons is a frequent invited/keynote speakers and has ca. 175 peer reviewed publications spanning topics in astrobiology, biogeochemistry, isotope geochemistry, oceanography, paleoceanography, Earth history, and diverse themes in geology. He has supervised 27 graduate students and 10 postdocs as primary mentor and often serves on external examining committees.
Dr. Lyons received a B.S. with honors in geological engineering from the Colorado School of Mines, an M.S. in geology from the University of Arizona, and an M.Phil. and Ph.D. in geology/geochemistry from Yale University, followed by postdoctoral studies at the University of Michigan.