Dr. Laura Guertin, Distinguished Professor of Earth Sciences
Email: guertin@psu.edu
Snail mail: Dr. Laura Guertin, Earth Sciences
Penn State Brandywine
25 Yearsley Mill Road
Media, PA, 19063
Hello! My name is Dr. Laura Guertin (students call me “Dr. G”). I am a Distinguished Professor of Earth Sciences at Penn State Brandywine in Media, PA.
I maintain close ties with the College of Earth & Mineral Sciences at Penn State University Park. In addition to serving as the College representative at the Brandywine campus, I participate in research and pedagogical projects with faculty, staff and students at University Park. At Penn State Brandywine, I advise for the intercollege minor on Environmental Inquiry and Earth Sustainability certificate.
My goals for all the courses I teach include increasing student Earth science, information, digital and geographic literacies. I accomplish this by providing students hands-on inquiry-based scientific investigations of their own design, integrating technological tools (from GPS and ArcGIS StoryMaps to Penn State’s Media Commons) and authentic data sets, and having students effectively communicate their new content knowledge. I want my students to understand the nature, process, and complexity of science and scientific inquiry, and most importantly, to be scientifically-literate citizens! My pedagogical research allows me to develop and integrate new and innovative methods to effectively engage and increase student learning to match my overarching course goal and secondary objectives. I have served as a councilor-at-large for the National Association of Geoscience Teachers and twice a past president of the Pennsylvania Earth Science Teachers Association.
I have a passion for mentoring undergraduate students in their first two years on inquiry-based projects and independent research. A number of students have worked with me and presented their findings at conferences and/or co-authored papers for peer-reviewed publications. I have served as a past chair for the Geoscience Division of the Council on Undergraduate Research and served as an elected councilor for the Geoscience Division for 15 years. I assist students in developing projects from their ideas and designs and do not have students carry out a piece of my research. I feel it is important for students to take ownership of the research process and see their projects through to completion with some sort of dissemination.
Since 2018, I have expanded my science communication toolkit by using quilts for science storytelling. I have been designing and sewing individual quilt pieces and entire collections, along with blog posts and videos, on different earth science themes. Examples of my collections include Stitching Hope for the Louisiana Coast, Drawing Down Towards Climate Solutions, and my work documenting my two months at sea on JOIDES Resolution with Stories from the South Atlantic Ocean.
A complete copy of my curriculum vitae can be downloaded as a PDF (updated June 2024). I maintain a blog for my students and anyone else to learn more about my life as a faculty member and to see what I do when I travel to conferences and in the field, and to follow my science storytelling via quilts at Journeys of Dr. G, From 2014-2023, I blogged about geoscience education, education technology, and science communication for the American Geophysical Union (AGU) at GeoEd Trek, a blog that is reproduced at this site.
View my ORCID iD page: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2426-8082
View my Google Scholar Profile at: http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=xYFIJ1QAAAAJ