A ’rock star’ in geology and education

Adding on to a list of accolades — including a National Science Foundation grant she brought from her previous institution — Sarah Sheffield, assistant professor and the undergraduate director in the Department of Earth Sciences, was recently awarded a prestigious Mid-Career Excellence Award from the Association for Women Geoscientists in the academia category.

For Sheffield, this was a humbling honor.

“The list of women who won this award before me are people that have been my formal and informal mentors,” Sheffield said. “I’m so thankful to be included and recognized in this list of people that I’ve looked up to. What’s affected me most is that my students also wrote some of the letters and talked about how I’ve encouraged them and made them feel like they had a place in geology. If I could boil down where I hope my career will be when I retire, it’s that I made the community a little more welcoming, so I was very touched.”

Although her main research focuses on paleobiology — she studies how marine animals that lived in geologic time would have evolved in response to big changes on Earth and how different fossil groups are evolutionarily related to one another — she is also passionate about how students learn in the classroom and works to find ways to make the science community more inclusive for all.

“I have a second strong line of research in education and DEI, publishing papers on how to better teach in the classroom and be more equitable. When we think geology, we envision somebody with a rock hammer going out into the field for six weeks,” she said. “It’s a very reductive way of thinking about geology and, among other reasons, it leads to geology often being the least diverse science field. Looking at ways of reimagining how the traditional geology model has always been run so that we can better accommodate everybody is a major goal of mine.”

This passion comes from personal experience. Originally, Sheffield was a music major at UNC Chapel Hill and planned on becoming a flute performance and high school band education major. She found she didn’t enjoy it; after taking a science class about dinosaurs, she became hooked on geology.

That path wasn’t smooth sailing. While the field sparked her passion, she struggled with math and felt as if it took longer for her to learn than others. Today, as a professor herself, she wants to work on ways to help the students like her who may not have the confidence or resources to succeed.

“I remember feeling in college that I didn’t know who to talk to about why I was struggling in class. I couldn’t figure out how everybody else made it look so easy,” she said. “When I went into teaching, I started seeing ways to explain things that I would have understood. I didn’t have any pedagogy words yet, but teaching in a way that supports all students has been the foundational approach for a lot of my classes. I want students to feel like they have all the freedom in the world to mess up, to grow and continue.”

Ancient Earth

On the other hand, Sheffield is also making waves with her paleontology research, which focuses on stemmed echinoderms; hundreds of millions of years old, their modern descendants include sea stars. These extinct creatures showed incredible diversity and some unusual features, including body plans that she described as looking like soft-serve ice cream cones or flattened tennis rackets.

Environmentally sensitive, echinoderms also offer insight as to how organisms today may respond to climate change.

“The world has been around for four and a half billion years, and the Earth has seen the highest highs with temperatures and sea levels and the lowest lows with extreme glaciations. Fossils have been there for a significant part of that history,” she said. “With that fossil record, I can ask questions about how organisms lived when it was warm or cold, how they moved, if they went extinct because of a change; if not, which features made them more likely to survive. We are trying to build a roadmap today of what’s going on with climate change, because organisms now are in distress, but the Earth has seen similar things before. We can understand today better by looking to the past.”

Sheffield not only collaborates with professional paleontologists, but also “avocational paleontologists” — people who pursue the field as a passionate hobby, with whom she has published several papers.

Although the AWG award is a happy reminder of her career success, Sheffield’s work at ��������, too, continues to grow. After a year and a half at the University, she continues to refine her lab group. A major focus: developing her student’s research and finding out which questions motivate them.

“I’ve really appreciated the student support. The resources that �������� pours into the students here to make sure they have opportunities has been something that’s impressed me, and that I haven’t always seen elsewhere,” she said. “I’ve also been grateful for the students who have been willing to be flexible with me and be open to learning, who have put their trust in me. My biggest desire is helping students learn how to love this field.”