Welcome to Christine Garcia, Geoscience Specimen Curator
Stanford Libraries and the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability (SDSS) are delighted to announce that Christine (Chrissy) Garcia will be joining Stanford Libraries on November 14, 2022 as the Geoscience Specimen Collections Curator and Manager. This unique position sits within the Libraries, but will be responsible for managing the rock, mineral, and paleontology collections for the School. This collaboration will combine the expertise of both groups with active faculty input on the historical and contemporaneous collections and the libraries deep knowledge of material management, metadata standards, physical and digital preservation, and digitization workflows.
Chrissy, as the inaugural curator, is well-suited to curate the collections using up-to-date standards and protocols. She is currently the Collections Manager, Geology, Department of Invertebrate Zoology and Geology at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. She began her tenure at the Cal Academy in 2014 as the Micropaleontology Research Intern working on the former collections of Union Oil of California. The collection contains approximately 1 million vials of residues from over 8,000 oil well cores. Her job was to "help rehouse the collection, process the residues, and taxonomically identify the foraminifera and other metazoans." She was then hired in the position of a curatorial assistant working with Dr. Jean DeMouthe, a well-known and respected expert in her field. In 2018 she moved into her current role of Collections Manager where she is responsible for the oversight of the geology collections, which is estimated to contain approximately 8-10 million specimens, and the management of four labs. In addition, she is the Project Manager of an National Science Foundation grant that is documenting and digitizing fossil marine invertebrate communities of the Eastern Pacific across eleven institutions in the United States.
Chrissy holds a B.S. in Geography, a B.A. in Geology, and an M.S. in Geology with an emphasis in marine geology and paleontology from Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida. She has presented her work at the Geological Society of America meetings, the American Geophysical Union meetings, and has published in journals such as PaleoBios and Biology Letters. She regularly presents at local science fairs, Cal Academy open houses, and as an invited speaker, most recently at the Crystal Gazers and San Francisco Gem and Mineral Society, the Astronomers for Planet Earth at San Francisco State University, and the University of San Fransciso Museum Studies program.
Chrissy notes that this position "presents an incredible opportunity to build something special that can serve research, education, and the public in a powerful way. Collections, and geological collections in particular, are an invaluable and unparalleled resource in aiding the understanding of the Earth, life on it, and our collective futures." We could not agree more and look forward to working collaboratively with the SDSS to create a dynamic well-stewarded research collection that will be of use to faculty, students, and scholars for many years to come.
