Timothy Lyons PhD, MPhil, MS

Timothy Lyons is a Distinguished Professor of Biogeochemistry in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of California, Riverside, where he has been on the faculty since 2005. Tim’s primary research interests are astrobiology, geobiology, biogeochemical cycles through time, ancient climate, Earth history, and the search for life beyond our solar system. Tim helped steer the new NASA Astrobiology Roadmap and now leads the ‘Alternative Earths’ team of the NASA Astrobiology Institute and the Alternative Earths Astrobiology Center at UC Riverside.

He is a fellow of the Geological Society of America, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Geochemical Society, and the European Association of Geochemistry and a recipient of an NSF CAREER Award. He was the 2016 Ingerson Lecturer of the Geochemical Society. He has also been a visiting scholar at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Sea Research, the University of Queensland, the University of Tasmania (Comet Fellow), the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology (Fellow, Hanse Institute of Advanced Study), the first Agassiz Lecturer at Harvard University, a Leverhulme Fellow at Cambridge University, the Institute of Geology and Geophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, a Hugh Kelly Fellow at Rhodes University in South Africa, and most recently at Yale University.

Dr. Lyons has served in nine editorial positions, including a long-standing affiliation with Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, and he has served on advisory boards with the American Geological Union and Cambridge University Press and as a guest editor for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He received a B.S. with honors in geological engineering from the Colorado School of Mines, an M.S. in geology from the University of Arizona, and an M.Phil. and a Ph.D. in geology/geochemistry from Yale University, followed by postdoctoral studies at the University of Michigan.