Dr Charlotte Pearson

Dr Charlotte Pearson is an Associate Professor at the University of Arizona's Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research. She gained her PhD at the University of Reading in the UK and was a postdoctoral scholar at Cornell University before joining the University of Arizona in 2013. She started out as a geoarchaeologist and got interested in tree-ring dating because it could give her the calendar year accuracy that she needed to explore past interactions between humans and their environment. She now works to innovate new dating methods to improve chronological frameworks and synchronize multiple lines of paleoenvironmental evidence through the 'Tree-Ring Innovations in Mass-Spectrometry (TIME) Laboratory. Her current research focuses on new applications for analysis of carbon 14 in single tree-rings, dendrochronological approaches to the chronology of the Ancient Mediterranean and dendrochemical approaches to dating the onset of environmental disturbances (in particular volcanic eruptions).