Trisha Spanbauer

Trisha Spanbauer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Kentucky. She has a Ph.D. in geology and biology from the University of Nebraska – Lincoln and a B.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Prior to becoming a professor, she held an associateship at the U.S. EPA’s Cincinnati Branch and an NSF postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work focuses on research at the interface of aquatic ecology, paleolimnology, paleoclimatology, and molecular ecology to address both ecological and evolutionary questions. She and her lab primarily work on reconstructing freshwater ecosystems with histories that span decades to hundreds of millennia. Her lab has specialized in using both fossils and ancient environmental DNA from sediment archives to better constrain how communities and populations respond to past and present environmental changes.