Dr. Catherine A. Rigsby
Assistant Professor
GRAHAM 301a
Education
- S. Geology, Lamar University, 1978
- S. Geology, Louisiana State University, 1982
- D. Earth Sciences, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1989
Research Interests
I am a sedimentologist with interests in the broad field of environmental history. My students and I do extensive field work (and/or core analysis) relating sedimentology to paleoclimatology, tectonic history, and landscape and land-use change. Most recently, that work has been in tropical South America (the Andes and the Amazon Basin) where we are examining fluvial, lacustrine, and shallow marine sediments with the aim of reconstructing past environments and the response of those environments to climate change and the evolution of the Amazon/Andes system. I am a participant in the recently funded Trans-Amazon Drilling Project, which will begin coring operations in early 2022 and will include International Continental Drilling Project core sites across the Amazon Basin and the International Ocean Discovery Program’s Expedition 387 (Amazon Margin) near the mouth of the Amazon.
I have also done research in the US west and southwest, in coastal and coastal plain North Carolina, and on the Tibetan plateau; worked as a petroleum geologist in central California and southeast Texas; and taught geology in classroom, laboratory, and field settings. I am the Institutional Principal Investigator for The World We Live In project, a BFW-sponsored project designed to introduce underrepresented high school students to STEM disciplines.
http://core.ecu.edu/geology/rigsbyc/rigsby/RigsbyVITA.pdf