Alexander Glass, Ph.D.
Senior Lecturer in Geology and Climate
Division of Earth and Climate Sciences
Nicholas School of the Environment
Duke University
E-mail: alex.glass@duke.edu
Phone (Work): 919-681-6167 ( I don’t ever use this or check messages)
Office Hours: TBD
I was born in and spent my childhood in Hildesheim, Germany before moving to Wheaton, Illinois in 1989. After trying out pre-med, biology, anthropology, and chemistry as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign I took my first geology class. I immediately fell in love with the science that allows its practitioners to have a career that combines outdoor fieldwork, domestic and international travel, state-of-the-art laboratory analysis, and both fundamental knowledge and applied-solution research. After a two year Masters at The Ohio State University, and another five years at U of I, I got my Ph.D. in geology with a focus in invertebrate paleontology. When I do get to do research I focus almost entirely on the fossil record of brittle stars. During my first job, a two year stint at Central Washington University, WA, I met my geologically- and botanically-inclined partner Jen. After moving to NC and Duke University in 2007, we got married on Precambrian gneisses along the NC Blue Ridge Parkway and soon thereafter I adopted her/my sons Adam (27) and Kyle (23).
I am unapologetically in love with rocks, the natural world, and living things. I am deeply convicted and motivated by my belief that ALL knowledge (be it in the natural sciences, humanities, arts, social sciences, religion, etc.) is essential and meaningful. Knowledge-gaining must first and foremost serve to enrich and deepen our individual and collective lives, and widen our understanding of reality beyond our limited individual horizons. Learning should be about growing curiosity, fascination, and awe in our place in the universe. Applications and solutions that come out of newly-gained knowledge are of course important and greatly needed. Nevertheless, I believe that an exclusive, narrow focus (particularly by academia) on only “solution-based inquiry” entraps us in our immediate, narrow present-day experience, stifles creativity, free inquiry, and limits the search for solutions to existing, well-worn, and much travelled paths. A university should first and foremost be a place at which research directions should be free of societal and economic pressures. I hope my teaching will reflect this conviction.
I love hiking, camping, gardening, carpentry, and playing board games. I am an avid reader of science fiction and fantasy, genres I consider Literature with a capital “L”. I enjoy and collect German audio dramas (aka “Hörspiele”), and consider paper-modelling a form of meditation. I am also an avid player of retro-computer games, and can be found letting off steam on my XBox (most recently wrestling with the concept of “Nothing is true, everything is permitted“). I am obsessed with all things geology, paleontology, evolution, biology, and zoology. I have been a lifelong “fringewatcher”, being deeply involved in the public science and religion, and creation-evolution discussion. Lately, I have also been dragged into the climate change and seal level rise denier debate.
My family lives on 1.1 acres of deciduous woodland in Efland, NC with, four cats (Vorian, Lucian, Loki, and Mina), two turtles (Logan, Olivia), a leopard gecko (Lily), a bearded dragon (Nurmi), four hermit crabs, and seven chickens (“the Ladies”).
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