Cecilia B. Sanders

When I was very young, my parents wrote me a book, printed it out, and put it in a blue plastic binder that I keep on my desk to this day. It was called “Cecilia and The Bed of Bones” and concerned a little black girl exploring the hills of Montana for dinosaur fossils and other remains of ancient worlds. That's what you call a self-fulfilling prophecy. Today, I am an assistant professor of geology at the University of Maryland, studying how and why evidence of life and its building blocks is preserved, and why it often isn’t. I do this by describing and quantifying the sedimentology and stratigraphy of rocks in Eastern Brazil, Southern Namibia, Southwestern Mongolia, Southern Kazakhstan, and the Southwestern United States. And, sometimes, by growing chemotrophic microorganisms under different conditions in the lab, to model ancient ecosystems, their preservation and destruction. I focus mostly on carbonates, phosphorites, cherts, and their relationship to microfossils and microbial textures, analyzing them using Raman spectroscopy, optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, and mass spectrometry of trace elements and stable isotopes. When I’m not in the lab or in the field, I am designing and teaching Earth history, astrobiology, and geoscience lessons for undergraduate and graduate-level students, and sometimes consulting on science education programming. I am also an artist, illustrating both science/technical diagrams and fantasy characters/landscapes.