Susannah Porter

Susannah received her bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from Yale University in 1995 and her Ph.D. in Biology at Harvard University in 2002. After completing a one-year NASA Astrobiology postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA, she moved to the University of California at Santa Barbara in 2003. She served as Department Chair from 2021-2024. Her research focuses on the rise of complex life, from the fossils of early eukaryotes to the first widespread appearance of skeletal animals. She has worked on problems relating to the effects of snowball Earth on life, the preservation of organic-walled microfossils, the earliest evidence for predation, the relationship between carbonate skeletal mineralogy and seawater chemistry, and patterns in skeletal acquisition across all eukaryotes. She is a Fellow of both the Paleontological Society and the Geological Society of America and a recipient of UCSB’s Distinguished Teaching Award.