Catherine Constable

Catherine Constable is a professor of geophysics in the Cecil H. and Ida M. Green Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics and, since September 2009, serves as the Deputy Director for Research and Associate Vice Chancellor for Marine Sciences at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. She holds an M.Sc. from Australian National University (1983); and a Ph.D. in geophysics from UCSD (1987). Constable has spent her career at Scripps, with research and professorial positions following her initial postdoctoral appointment. Constable’s research is concerned with Earth’s magnetic field, and the use of inverse theory and statistical methods in geophysics. She is particularly interested in variations in the geomagnetic field on decadal to million year timescales and how the changing structure of the magnetic field and events like geomagnetic reversals are related to processes in Earth’s deep interior. Constable also studies how recent satellite magnetic field observations can be used to determine the electrical conductivity of Earth’s mantle. She is an active proponent of the development of databases allowing electronic access to paleomagnetic and rock magnetic data and the author/co-author of over 70 peer-reviewed scientific articles. Constable is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union (and former President of its Geomagnetism and Paleomagnetism Section), a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Royal Astronomical Society, which awarded her its Price Medal for Geomagnetism in 1997.

Email: cconstable@ucsd.edu