Meet our 2025 UMSRS Invited Speakers
Dorothy J Merritts
Dorothy Merritts (B.Sc. Indiana University of Pennsylvania, M.Sc. Stanford University, Ph.D. University of Arizona) is a geologist with expertise in streams, rivers, and other landforms, and on the impact of geologic processes, climate change, and human activities on the form and history of Earth's surface. Her primary research in the eastern United States is in the Appalachian mid-Atlantic region, where she is investigating the role of human activities in transforming the upland woodlands and valley bottom wetland meadows of Eastern North America to a predominantly agricultural and mixed-industrial/urban landscape since European settlement. Associated with this work is developing new methods of wetland, floodplain, and stream restoration that rely upon geomorphic investigation. She uses lidar and other remote sensing data to map geomorphic evidence for continuous permafrost during the last glacial maximum period throughout Pennsylvania and Maryland. In the western United States, she conducted research along the northern San Andreas Fault of coastal California for two decades; her international work focused on fault movements in South Korea, Indonesia, Australia, and Costa Rica. She is a professor in the Department of Earth and Environment at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. From 2004 to 2005 she was the Flora Stone Mather Visiting Distinguished Professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. From 2011 to 2012 she was the Alan Cox Visiting Professor at Stanford University. She is the author of an introductory textbook in environmental geology, numerous scientific papers and edited book chapters, and contributing author to five National Research Council reports. She was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.
Her full curriculum vitae can be viewed HERE.
Jonathan Czuba
Associate Professor. Research areas: River and floodplain processes and restoration; sediment transport; ecohydraulics and ecomorphodynamics.
Dr. Jonathan A. Czuba, P.E., is an Associate Professor of Ecological Engineering in the Department of Biological Systems Engineering at Virginia Tech. He was recently awarded the Universities Council On Water Resources (UCOWR) 2023 Early Career Award in Applied Research. Dr. Czuba received his B.S. and M.S. in Civil Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, earned his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of Minnesota, and has over 5 years of experience working as a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Illinois and Washington State. His research focuses on the development and application of modeling tools to predict the transport and fate of sediment and nutrients in rivers and inform river management, including: 1) understanding the fundamentals of stream and floodplain restoration, 2) transport on the branching structure of river networks, and 3) how water and sediment affect and are affected by vegetation and biota.
Chris Jones
IIHR Research Engineer. Water-Quality Monitoring and Research.