Summary
Dr. Julie Loisel was born and raised near Montreal, in the Quebec province of Canada. Prior to earning a B.S. and M.S. in Physical Geography at University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM), she spent two years traveling across Canada and western Europe, where she worked as a ski instructor and ski guide. Dr. Loisel moved to Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley in 2008 to complete a PhD in Earth and Environmental Sciences at Lehigh University, where she studied the contrasting Holocene carbon dynamics in peatlands from Alaska and Patagonia. After three years working as a post-doc at Lehigh and then UCLA, she moved to Houston to join the Department of Geography at Texas A&M University in 2015. She then moved to Reno to join the Department of Geography at the University of Nevada, Reno in January 2024.
Dr. Loisel has been conducting field research on terrestrial ecosystem ecology, paleoclimatology, and geomorphology in the United States Southwest, the Arctic (Canada, Alaska), the Antarctic and southern Patagonia, the and tropics (Peru, Costa Rica). Those expeditions have been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, Lehigh University, Texas A&M University, and DoD's Southwest Climate Science Center. Her research focuses on long-term terrestrial ecosystem response to global change, specifically on carbon sequestration in peatland ecosystems from around the world and on peat-based paleoenvironmental reconstructions using a suite of proxies (plant fossils, stable isotopes, testate amoebae, etc.).
Research interests
- Peatlands
- Wetlands
- Soils
- Carbon cycling
- Terrestrial ecosystem dynamics
- Paleoecology
- Paleoclimatology
- Environmental change
- Holocene
- Quaternary
- Alpine, arctic, antarctic regions
- Tropical regions
- Mountain systems
Education
- Ph.D. in Earth and Environmental Sciences, Lehigh University (USA), 2012
- M.S. in Physical Geography, University of Quebec in Montreal (Canada), 2008
- B.S. in Physical Geography, University of Quebec in Montreal (Canada), 2006