Julie Brigham-Grette, a professor of geosciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. has received the Distinguished Career Award from the American Quaternary Association. The Quaternary period embraces the most recent of the three periods of the Cenozoic Era which began nearly 2.6 million years ago and continues to this day. The award honors someone with a decades-long commitment to and positive impact within Quaternary science, and who has worked on North American Quaternary issues for a substantial part of their career.
Her research interests and experience span the broad spectrum of arctic marine and terrestrial paleoclimate records dealing with the Late Cenozoic to the recent evolution of the Arctic climate, especially in the Bering Strait region. Among many notable achievements, Dr. Brigham-Grette led the $10 million International Continental Scientific Drilling Program at Lake El’gygytgyn in North Eastern Russia. The program collected a 1,100-foot sedimentary record of Arctic change over the past 3.6 million years — the longest such continuous sedimentary Arctic record in existence.
Professor Brigham-Grette is a past chair of the Polar Research Board of the National Academy of Sciences. She joined the faculty at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1987.
Dr. Brigham-Grette is a graduate of Albion College in Michigan, where she majored in geology. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from the University of Colorado Boulder.