Dr Grace Shephard

Content navigation

About

I am a interested in what the Earth looked like millions of years ago, including the past configurations of the continents and oceans, and the structure of deep convecting interior. To do this I build digital Earth models that piece together information from geology, geophysics and geochemistry. The timescales involved in these models covers "deep time" i.e. from present-day to hundreds of millions of years in the past.  These models allows us better understand processes including climate, volcanism, and the development of minerals.

I received my PhD from the University of Sydney (EarthByte Group) and then moved to Norway. I have worked as a postdoc and researcher at two Norwegian Centres of Excellence - the Centre for Earth Evolution and Dynamics (CEED; 2013-2023) and the Centre for Planetary Habitability (PHAB; 2023-2033).

I am currently funded on a Young Researcher Talent Grant from the Norwegian Research Council for my project "POLARIS - Evolution of the Arctic in deep time."

I am currently an Honorary Senior Lecturer RSES (2023-current) hosted within the Geophysics-Geodynamics groups

Full list of publications on Google Scholar  

Affiliations

science Research area

Research interests

I am a geophysicist and geodynamicist with a foot in the computational and observational domains. I have a particular focus on:
  • Plate tectonic reconstructions, including the polar and circum-Pacific regions
  • Palaeogeography, including the interplay of tectonics with oceans and climate
  • Mantle structure and evolution, including the history of subduction and large-scale volcanism
  • GPlates software

Also interested in science communication and data visualization:

Projects

Location

J2.G50