Ben Lloyd
Research areas
Ben is originally from the San Francisco Bay Area and received a BA in Geology from Colorado College in 2019. His undergraduate research focused on the earliest Cenozoic of Colorado, where he investigated changes in plant communities, climate, and the carbon cycle in the aftermath of the K-Pg mass extinction event. After graduating, he stuck around Colorado Springs to work for his alma mater, where he ran field trips and taught labs for the geology department. After a brief early-COVID stint in paleontological consulting, he moved to DC to work for the Smithsonian’s Fossil Atmospheres Project. There, he grew ginkgo trees in elevated CO2 to develop and refine proxies for past atmospheric composition. He arrived at UW in 2022, where he is researching the dynamics of the expansion of C4-dominated grassland ecosystems across Australia.