Julie Loisel

Dr. Julie Loisel was born and raised near Montreal, in the Quebec province of Canada. Prior to earning a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Physical Geography at University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM), she spent two years traveling across Canada and western Europe, where she worked as a ski instructor and ski guide. Dr. Loisel moved to Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley in 2008 to complete a PhD in Earth and Environmental Sciences at Lehigh University, where she studied the contrasting Holocene carbon dynamics in peatlands from Alaska and Patagonia. After three years working as a post-doc at Lehigh and then UCLA, she moved to Houston to join Texas A&M University in 2015.

Dr. Loisel has been conducting field research on terrestrial ecosystem ecology, paleoclimatology, and geomorphology in the United States Southwest, Canada, Alaska, southern Patagonia (Chile and Argentina), Peru, and the Antarctic Peninsula. Those expeditions have been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, Lehigh University, Texas A&M University, and DoD's Southwest Climate Science Center. Her research focuses on long-term terrestrial ecosystem response to global change, specifically on carbon sequestration in peatland ecosystems from around the world and on peat-based paleoenvironmental reconstructions using a suite of proxies (plant fossils, stable isotopes, testate amoebae, etc.).