I am an Assistant Professor of Geology at the School of Earth, Environment and Society of Bowling Green State University (BGSU), Ohio. My research covers a wide range of topics from magnetic minerals to modern environmental problems. At BGSU, I teach Life Through Time, Earth Environments, Sedimentology, Stratigraphy, Paleoclimate, and Basin Analysis.
I received my PhD in anthropology at Rutgers University in New Jersey, USA, where I studied the geology of fossil and archaeological sites in Kenya. My advisors in geology were Craig Feibel and Gail Ashley, and Susan Cachel and Jack Harris in anthropology. I was fortunate to remain at Rutgers as a teaching professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, instructing the introduction to geology and Earth Systems course entitled “Planet Earth”. Carl Swisher and Greg Mountain were chairs at the time, helping me to navigate the vagaries of teaching to large classrooms with hundreds of students. They also supported a modest research lab that allowed me to obtain NSF funding for my ongoing research in Kenya.
While teaching, I was employed by Dennis Kent at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, managing the day-to-day operations of his Paleomagnetics Lab for nearly a decade. In collaboration with European colleagues, we published some critical papers on the world’s oldest stone tools using magnetostratigraphy to constrain the age. I also had the opportunity to participate on the Colorado Plateau Coring Project by conducting the paleomagnetic stratigraphy on the core in Dennis’ lab and began my own study of red bed color in collaboration with Paul Olsen of Lamont-Doherty. At Lamont, I had the chance to work with many environmental scientists, geologists, and scholars, while performing research on sediment cores from the Late Triassic Newark basin, NJ Paleocene-Eocene coastal plain, and legacy ocean cores in the repository.
Since moving to BGSU, my scholarship has shifted to looking at wetlands in ancient and modern contexts. I have active research in the H2Ohio wetlands to examine how iron oxide minerals (like ferrihydrite and goethite) may bind with nutrients that cause harmful algal blooms in Lake Erie. This work is funded by the Ohio/NOAA Sea Grant program. In addition, I have been awarded funding by the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund to study the chronostratigraphy and potential critical minerals within the Paleozoic coal deposits of the Appalachian basin. My BGSU lab is also part of phase 2 for the Colorado Plateau Coring Project, entitled MESAS (Mesozoic Environments and Stratigraphy of the American Southwest).
Please contact me for graduate student and undergraduate research projects. There are plenty opportunities for students to participate!
Lepre's Research 