Our team consists of researchers with backgrounds in geoscience, computer science, engineering, and physics.
Dr. Leigh Stearns is a Professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences. Her research focuses on understanding how glaciers and climate interact over a variety of timescales and quantifying the impacts of these changes. Dr. Stearns earned her PhD at the University of Maine, her M.S. at The Ohio State University, and her B.A. at Carleton College. She has authored over 70 peer-reviewed articles and has been awarded 26 competitive grants from NASA, NOAA, NSF, DoD, and the Heising-Simons Foundation. She has been a Faculty Fellow at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) since 2022. Prior to arriving at UPenn, she was a faculty member in the Dept. of Geology at the University of Kansas.
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Dr. Michael Shahin is a PostDoctoral Researcher focusing on ice-ocean interactions in Greenland. He thrives on building automated workflows for complicated datasets (e.g. LiDAR point clouds and disparate remote sensing platforms) to answer fundamental glaciology questions. Dr. Shahin’s first paper highlights the unique calving style of Helheim Glacier, East Greenland, using an Automated Terrestrial LiDAR System (Shahin et al., 2025).
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Malisse Lummus is in the final stretch of her PhD at UPenn. Her research centers on environmental hazards and climate vulnerabilities in High Mountain Asia. Often, these hazards are explored in isolation, but for mountain communities they are connected and often inter-twined. Malisse’s work quantifies the risk associated with different hazards in High Mountain Asia.
As a first-generation student, Malisse is particularly attuned to the often-unwritten rules and expectations prevalent in academia. She developed geogradapp.com to bring transparency to the application process and to provide support for undergraduate students applying to graduate school.
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Mark Hellwig is a senior undergraduate major in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. He has a strong background in physics and computer science and is currently developing an optical flow model using machine learning to track icebergs using time-lapse and satellite imagery.
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