Doug Burbank

Biography
After growing up in Connecticut and working in Hartford’s inner city, I was a Literature major at Reed College, where I wrote a thesis on Aldous Huxley: an intellectual hero of mine. After getting married and working for Outward Bound schools in Maine, England’s Lake District, and British Columbia, I turned to geology at age 23, expecting to become a high-school Earth Science teacher. Instead, I got an MSc at UWashington where I helped quantify the neoglacial history of Mt. Rainier, followed by a PhD at Dartmouth where I focused on Plio-Pleistocene tectonics in the NW Himalaya. I have been a professor at the University of Southern California (1982-1997), Penn State (1997-2001), and (very happily) UCSB (2001-2017). My geological research took me and my advisees/collaboratoes to active and ancient mountain ranges in the Himalaya, Tibet, Kyrgyzstan, New Zealand, Australia, Argentina, & Chile.  Since retirement, I have been cycling 4-6 days/week when not traveling on extended domestic and foreign trips a few times a year.
DW Burbank CV

Research
My research has focused on tectonic geomorphology and the reconstructing the history of orogenesis in the world’s major mountain ranges; active tectonics; interactions of tectonics, erosion, climate and time in shaping landscapes (particularly the structural and stratigraphic evolution of fold-and-thrust belts and foreland basins); physiographic evolution of mountain ranges; kinematics of folding; and the stratigraphic record of past climate change. Major research sites include Tibet, Kyrgyzstan, the Himalayas, Pyrenees, and Andes. Talented graduate students, post-doctoral scholars and dedicated undergrads have been integral to the success of my research. Figures  from Tectonic Geomorphology, 2nd Edition 2011