*Bio: E. Christa Farmer, Ph.D. was one of the first students at Stanford University to graduate with a B.S. (1994) in a new interdisciplinary environmental program called Earth Systems that incorporated courses in biology, geology, and economics. She subsequently found her dream job with the U.S. Forest Service studying small forest carnivores and getting paid to hike in the southern Sierra Nevada mountains. She spent much of her time, however, wondering if driving the research vehicles was causing more damage to the ecosystem through climate change than doing good through the research. Working for the Environmental and Energy Study Institute and the U.S. Climate Action Network during the negotiation of the Kyoto Protocol in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change led her back to graduate school to study paleoclimatology and learn more about how our climate system functions.

Her doctoral dissertation, completed in 2005 at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, developed a new multi-species proxy for thermocline depth in the upper ocean, and presented new high-resolution climate records from the Southern Hemisphere. As a Professor in the Geology, Environment, and Sustainability Department at Hofstra University, she teaches classes on Planet Earth, Environmental Geology, Field Methods, Sedimentation, Oceanography, and Paleoclimatology, among others. She co-edited a book with J. Bret Bennington, which was published in 2014 by Elsevier, titled Learning from the Impacts of Superstorm Sandy, and published a 2018 study with Elisabeth Ploran and Mary Anne Trasciatti on decisions by residents of Long Beach, NY, whether to evacuate from Sandy. She is currently the PI on a National Science Foundation GEOPaths grant with her colleagues J Bret Bennington, Antonios Marsellos, and Jase Bernhardt, to run summer geoscience research programs.