Jonathan Payne
- Professor, Earth & Planetary Sciences
- Senior Fellow, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment
- Professor (By courtesy), Biology
- Member, Bio-X
- Affiliate, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment
I received my B.A. in Geosciences from Williams College in 1997. After graduation, I spent two years working as a high school math and science teacher. I then returned to graduate school, earning my Ph.D. in Earth and Planetary Sciences from Harvard University in the spring of 2005. Following a post-doctoral fellowship at Penn State, I joined the faculty at Stanford University in the fall of 2005. My research addresses the relationship between environmental change and biological evolution in the fossil record, with a focus on mass extinction events and long-term trends in the ecological structure of marine ecosystems. I teach courses for undergraduates in historical geology and invertebrate paleobiology and courses for graduate students in carbonate sedimentology, geobiology, and paleobiology.
Highlights
Extinction changes rules of body size evolution
A sweeping analysis of marine fossils from most of the past half-billion years shows the usual rules of body size evolution change during mass extinctions and their recoveries. The discovery is an early step toward predicting how evolution will play out on the other side of the current extinction crisis.
