Guest Speaker
Sonia Esperança holds a B.A. in Geology from Rice University, a M.Sc. in Earth Sciences from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a Ph.D. in Geology from Arizona State University. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and Northwestern University from 1985 to 1988 and an Assistant Professor of Earth Sciences at Old Dominion University. In 1990, she moved to Australia where she held faculty appointments at Monash and Deakin Universities in Melbourne until 1995. She returned to the US as the Manager of the Isotope Geochemistry Laboratory in the Department of Geology of the University of Maryland-College Park.
She joined the NSF (National Science Foundation) in 1999, when she became the Program Director of Petrology and Geochemistry in the Division of Earth Sciences. She is the representative for the Directorate of Geosciences for a number of Cross-Directorate activities including ADVANCE (Increasing the Participation and Advancement of Women in Academic Science and Engineering Careers), Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER), and the Science and Technology Center (STC) programs.