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Dr. Sara Polanco

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Position: Senior Lecturer

Department: Geosciences

University/Institute/Company: The University of Sydney

About

Sara Polanco is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Geosciences at the University Sydney and a Fulbright Scholar at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). She is interested on understanding how and why landscapes change in time and space. Decoding the dynamic evolution of landscapes provides fundamental information to sustainably manage water resources and to implement technologies that naturally reduce CO₂ levels in the atmosphere. Her expertise spans sediment transport dynamics, land-ocean connections, climatic-tectonic interactions, numerical modelling, and isotopic geochemistry. Her career has followed an international path from Colombia to the USA and Australia. Sara holds a MPhil in Geology from the University of Minnesota (USA) and a PhD in Geology from the University of Adelaide. Her postdoctoral research (The University of Melbourne and Sydney) was developed under the umbrella of the ARC Hub for Basin Geodynamics and Evolution of Sedimentary Systems, a $5.4M project connecting “Big Data” analysis and high-performance computing. She is passionate about the role of geosciences in helping achieve the UN sustainability development goals.

Disciplines: Geoscience