Quoting the College of Arts + Sciences News:
"The NSF CAREER grant supports early-career faculty as they pursue a lifetime of leadership integrating research and teaching in the sciences. Stevens Goddard, an assistant professor and the Lee J. Suttner Professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences within the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington (IUB), is also the founder and leader of the fission track lab at IUB.
The NSF CAREER grant supports a study investigating how much erosion rates change in response to vegetation,” said Professor Stevens Goddard. She and her research team at the College of Arts and Sciences use the geological record of the past as an experiment spanning millions of years. “We’re looking at layers of sedimentary rocks that were deposited on the surface of the earth during times before land plants had evolved, and during different stages of land plant evolution,” Stevens Goddard noted. “The rocks give us an experiment at a size and scale and over millions of years that we could never set up in a laboratory."