Susan Trumbore, Ph.D., director of Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, UD alumna, Class of 1981
Susan Trumbore directs the prestigious Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany. Her research centers on studying soils and plant life to understand how human activity alters the Earth’s natural exchanges of carbon among ocean, land and atmosphere. She was selected for the 2018 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Earth and Environmental Science for helping to pioneer a technique to measure the levels of carbon in plants and soil.
Trumbore earned her bachelor’s degree in geology at UD in 1981 and is the second UD alum to earn the Franklin Medal in the last three years. Brian Atwater earned the award in 2016 for his pioneering study of coastal sediments and the natural disasters that affect their distribution, such as earthquakes and tsunamis.
In addition to directing the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Trumbore is a professor of earth system science at University of California, Irvine. She also co-directs the W.M. Keck Carbon Cycle Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Facility at UCI and directs the UCI branch of the UC Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics.
Trumbore was named a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2005 and 2006, respectively. Other career honors include membership in the National Academy of Sciences (2010) the National Science Foundation’s National Young Investigator award and UD’s Presidential Citation for Outstanding Achievement award, both in 1993.
Trumbore completed post-doctoral research at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, before joining University of California, Irvine, in 1991. She earned her doctoral degree in geology and geochemistry from Columbia University in 1989.