Lamont-Doherty Geochemist Wins Columbia’s Top Teaching Prize

Special from The Record

Over billions of years, Earth’s continents have split apart and rejoined, and ice sheets have disappeared. Although the natural world is full of drama, the problem for teachers is that it happens in geological time, not real time.

Enter Columbia graduate student Kat Allen, who has developed a repertoire of techniques for bringing the popular introductory geology course, “The Climate System,” to life.

“Physicists can drop objects and roll model cars down ramps to demonstrate universal forces,” she says. “But geologists can’t fit an entire river delta into a lecture hall. If you’re stuck in a classroom, you need to be creative.”

She tries to make concepts tangible for her students, comparing the size of an iceberg to Central Park or the depth of an ocean trench to Mount Everest.

At Commencement, Allen received Columbia’s top teaching honor, which comes with an $8,000 prize.

In her lab at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Allen studies ancient plankton shells to learn about past ocean acidification. Her research has involved scuba diving off Puerto Rico and California’s Catalina Island to collect living plankton that she brings back to the lab and grows in glass jars.

She spends weeks measuring how the water’s temperature, acidity and other measures influence the growth of the plankton’s shell, the better to understand the ocean’s past chemistry and estimate how much carbon dioxide was in the air. Despite exotic fieldwork locations, most of the work involves long days in a lab, but Allen goes about her work “humming and whistling, always in a good mood,” says her colleague and adviser, Bärbel Hönisch.

Growing up, Allen liked exploring the tide pools and crags near her hometown of Falmouth, Maine, and says it was probably this early exposure to the outdoors that led her to study geology at Case Western Reserve University. At the suggestion of her rowing coach, she applied for and won a Churchill Scholarship to Cambridge University.

She came to Columbia in 2007 for her Ph.D., and is known at Lamont for her “coffee poems,” which put the latest journal studies into verse. Every Friday she sends an email to her colleagues with her latest effort, closing with an invitation to “come on down for coffee and cookies.” A study from the journalScience suggesting that dinosaurs could see in the dark led to this set of rhymes: “Eye shape and size just might/Show dinos prowled at night!/With great big teeth/And claws beneath:/They’d give me quite a fright!”

“I like to think of coffee hour as a social catalyst,” she explains. “I have no idea if the silly poems motivate people to come, but they’ve sparked some fun conversations.”

When it comes to teaching, Allen is a firm believer in getting students outdoors to learn about earth’s processes. At Columbia, she has led her fellow grad students on field trips to Iceland and brought New York City high school students to Piermont Marsh on the Hudson River to do their own research.

Two of her students this year made it to the finals of the prestigious Intel International Science and Technology Fair for original research on a threatened bayou fish. In the classroom, she explains how data are collected using specialized instruments, from satellites to air balloons. “I think it’s important for students to get in the habit of asking questions like: How was that measured? What’s the uncertainty?” she says. “In a world flooded with information, I want students to make informed decisions, whether they end up in a science career or not.”

—by Kimberly Martineau