2025

March 20, 2025

More than Magma: Dr. Terry Plank Delivers Second Annual Mather Scholar Lecture

Volcanoes are responsible for building more than 80 percent of the Earth’s surface, and a subject of fascination and research for Dr. Terry Plank, who has studied them in Alaska, Italy, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Iceland, and at sea. She will deliver West Chester University’s Second Annual Mather Scholar Lecture on Wednesday, March 26, at 6 p.m. in the Sciences & Engineering Center and The Commons (SECC) Room 108. The program is free and open to the public.

A geochemist and volcanologist who studies magmas associated with the plate tectonic cycle, Dr. Plank is the Arthur D. Storke Memorial Professor of earth science at Columbia University and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. She is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Plank studies what happens when tectonic plates collide, forcing one under the other at a subduction zone. Because these collisions generate tremendous heat, they are frequently associated with volcanoes, which Plank uses as a window to the chemical and physical forces deep below the surface.

Her research focuses on the volatile contents of magmas, timescales of magma ascent and eruption, recycling of material at subduction zones and mantle melting regions. Recently, she has been determining the water concentration that magmas contain before they erupt through the analysis of tiny inclusions of melt trapped inside volcanic crystals. This water drives both melt formation in the mantle as well as explosive volcanic eruptions.

Her scientific articles have appeared in such journals as Nature, the Journal of Geophysical Research, and Nature Geoscience, among others.

Plank received the Houtermans Medal from the European Association for Geochemistry and the Donath Medal from the Geological Society of America. She is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Art and Sciences. She is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, the Geochemical Society, the Geological Society of America, and the Mineralogical Society of America. Dr. Plank received an A.B. (1985) from Dartmouth College and a Ph.D. (1993) from Columbia University.

This lecture series at WCU is named for Sandra “Sandie” F. Pritchard Mather ’64, M’68. Mather earned a B.S.in elementary education and an M.Ed. in geography from what was then West Chester State College, and her Ph.D. from the University of Oregon. She returned to her alma mater to teach in the West Chester Laboratory School before accepting a position in the Department of Earth and Space Sciences teaching both undergraduate and graduate geology, meteorology, and geomorphology. After retiring in 1999, she was named WCU emerita professor of geology and astronomy. During the University’s Sesquicentennial in 2021-22, she was selected as one of the 150 Most Influential Women of West Chester. A long-time supporter of the University and its students, she is also the namesake of the WCU planetarium. Read more about Mather here.