Biography

Dr. Tim Patterson is a Professor of Geology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. He received both a B.Sc. in Biology (1980) and a B.A. in Geology (1983) from Dalhousie University, Halifax, N.S. and a Ph.D. in Geology from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1986 under the supervision of the late Professor Helen Tappan Loeblich and late Dr. Alfred R. Loeblich. After brief stints as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California at Berkeley (1986) and as a visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California (1987) he was appointed to the Department of Earth Sciences at Carleton University in 1988 as an Assistant Professor. He was promoted to Full Professor in 1999.  He was appointed an International Fellow in the School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology at the Queen's University of Belfast in 2006.

Tim Patterson helped develop, and was a founding editor-in-chief (1997-2000), of the journal Palaeontologia Electronica, the world’s first, and longest running, open access, electronic paleontology-themed journal. He served as an associate editor for the journal Micropaleontology (1990-1997), and in a similar capacity at the Journal of Foraminiferal Research (1995-2008). He was Canadian leader of the UNESCO supported International Geological Correlation Programme Project (IGCP) 367 "Late Quaternary Coastal Records of Rapid Change" (1994-1997) and 495 "Quaternary Land-Ocean interactions" from 2005-2009.

Patterson's research has been exclusively funded by Canadian federal, provincial/territorial and municipal agencies. He has been continuously funded by Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Operating/Discovery grants since arriving at Carleton (1989-present). In addition to being co-investigator on numerous major research initiatives through the years he was Principal Investigator (PI) for a NSERC Strategic Project grant (1998-2001), which was mandated to investigate the late Holocene response of commercially important fish species to climate variability in the northeast Pacific.  He was PI for a major Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences (CFCAS) funded (2001-2004) initiative to carry our an “ultra high resolution Holocene investigation of the paleoclimate-oceanographic record archived in anoxic basins along the British Columbia coast”.  He was PI on a just concluded NSERC-Geoscience Office of the Northwest Territories-AANDC-GSC funded Strategic Project Grant (2009-2014) mandated to carry out a “paleoclimatological assessment of the central Northwest Territories” to assess implications for the long-term viability of the Tibbitt to Contwoyto Winter Road.  He is presently co-PI, along with his former Ph.D. student Jennifer Galloway (GSC, Calgary), on a  major three-year (2015-2018) Polar Knowledge Canada funded initiative with the objective of developing “geoscience tools for supporting environmental risk assessment of metal mining” in the Canadian arctic.

Tim Patterson has made ~300 scholarly contributions, including ~145 peer-reviewed research papers. His current research emphasizes the use of micropaleontological, sedimentological, and geochemical techniques to:

• study paleoclimate records in Holocene lake, marine, and peatland environments.

• assess the impact of anthropogenic land-use change on lake and marine ecosystems.

Patterson runs a busy lab presently comprised of 1 post-doctoral researcher, 2 Ph.D. students, 3 M.Sc. students and 3 B.Sc. honors students. As of 2015 he has graduated 14 M.Sc. and 14 Ph.D. students, who carried out their research under his direct supervision. Most have gone on to successful careers as earth scientists in academia, government labs, and industry.

For his research efforts he was awarded a 2002-2003 Carleton University Research Achievement Award for 'outstanding research'.

Tim’s personal interests include: Liz, Malcolm, Calder and Heather, fast computers, spacious SUVs, fishing, deer and bird hunting, photography, gardening, genealogy, roman coins, home repair (not sure that this is actually a hobby), and various science fiction television series. Overall the perfect demographic.