Sherilyn C. Fritz

Biosketch

Sheri Fritz is an ecologist with broad interests in paleoecology, paleoclimate, and aquatic ecology. She is best known for her research on using the diatom fossil record from lakes to reconstruct landscape evolution and patterns of climate variation. Fritz was born in Chicago, Illinois and grew up primarily in Bethesda, Maryland. She holds a PhD from the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities (1985), a MS from Kent State University (1979), and a BA from Macalester College (1974). Fritz held positions as a Research Scientist at University of Minnesota (1985-1994) and as an Assistant and Associate Professor at Lehigh University (1995-1998) before moving to the University of Nebraska – Lincoln (1999). Currently, she is the George Holmes University Professor, with joint appointments in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and the School of Biological Sciences. Fritz is a Member of the US National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, the Geological Society of America (GSA), and the International Biogeography Society. She has received the Hans Oeschger Medal of the European Geophysical Union for climate change research (2014), the GSA Israel C Russell Award for achievements in limnogeology (2018), and the International Paleolimnology Association Lifetime Achievement Award (2018). She has served as President of the American Quaternary Association and Co-Chair of PAGES (Past Global Changes) and of the International Continental Drilling Program Science Advisory Group.

Research Interests

Fritz uses lakes and their diatom flora to investigate contemporary ecosystem dynamics, climate and environmental history, and evolutionary change. She has carried out research from the Arctic to the tropics and across time scales from historical to millions of years. Her research using diatoms has spanned ecology, physiology, taxonomy, and paleontology and used empirical observations, physiological experiments, and modeling. Fritz was at the forefront of using diatoms as a tool for reconstructing past climate from continental lake deposits by developing a diatom transfer function for lake salinity change driven by drought. This transfer function was used to reconstruct drought variability in the North American Great Plains and generated one of the earliest records demonstrating that major droughts more persistent than those in recorded history (so-called “megadroughts”) are a recurrent part of natural climate variation in the continental interior. Fritz was a lead investigator in the Lake Titicaca Drilling Program, the first large-lake drilling project funded by the International Continental Drilling Program. This research documented the tight coupling of climate variation in tropical South America with climate in the North Atlantic region on multiple time scales and the impact of that variability on lacustrine biota and their evolution. Presently, she is one of the lead-PIs of the Trans-Amazon Drilling Project, a collaborative international project to investigate the role of climatic and geologic history in the evolution of biodiversity in the Amazon.