Susannah Morey

Assistant Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences

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Ph.D. 2023, Department of Earth & Space Sciences
University of Washington

Susannah Morey joins Vanderbilt University’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences as an assistant professor specializing in critical zone science. After receiving her undergraduate education at the University of Texas at Austin, she earned her Ph.D. in geology from the University of Washington in 2023, where her dissertation examined the legacy of megafloods in the eastern Himalaya under the guidance of Dr. Katharine Huntington. Prior to joining Vanderbilt, she served as a postdoctoral associate at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Morey’s research focuses on understanding how extreme geomorphic events-particularly outburst floods and landslides-shape Earth’s surface across multiple timescales. Her work combines numerical modeling, field observations, and geochronology to investigate how catastrophic events influence long-term landscape evolution. Her research on Tibetan megafloods has revealed how these climate-driven catastrophes carved mountain landscapes and left lasting signatures persisting for thousands of years. During her postdoctoral appointment, Morey expanded her research to investigate how landslide frequency and magnitude control long-term landscape evolution through numerical modeling experiments. She has been developing projects bridging geologic and human timescales, including studying the decadal impacts of the 2013 Front Range convective storm that triggered over 800 landslides and debris flows. As part of her collaborative work at CIRES, she has contributed to the development of Landlab landscape evolution modeling components and is excited to establish a monitoring catchment in Spruce Gulch, Colorado, that will serve as a natural laboratory for understanding post-extreme event landscape recovery.