Christine Metzger is CCA's first tenure-track assistant professor of Earth and environmental science. Dr. Metzger is currently a co-principal investigator for a 3-year, interdisciplinary $200,000 National Science Foundation grant: Exploring Science in the Studio, which funds continued efforts to embed scientists into the studio curriculum. She is also the developer of many interdisciplinary courses that bring science to arts and design students, such as Bad Science at the Movies which is an introductory geology class as seen via the lens of Hollywood disaster movies, and Life on Earth through Time, a history of four-billion years of life history that incorporates illustration and other creative work with science.
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In her research, Dr. Metzger is interested in using paleosols (ancient soils) as a proxy for understanding how landscapes and ecosystems respond to environmental changes. Her recent work involves field studies of 16-million year old paleosols in Argentina and Australia that formed during the Middle Miocene Climactic Optimum, a period of ancient climatic warming analogous to modern global warming. She is currently working on refining and expanding the Miocene Soil Database (MSDB), a new, robust dataset of paleosol type and location for this warm period, providing a potentially useful source of information for modelers of modern and future climate change.
While at CCA, Dr. Metzger represented California College of the Arts, an official observer organization, at the United Nations Framework on Climate Change Conference of the Parties 17, held in Durban, South Africa, in 2010. She has also served on the Executive Committee of the Faculty Senate, the President's Sustainability Steering Committee, and the Humanities and Sciences Undergraduate Curriculum Revision Committee.
In the summers, Dr. Metzger is an instructor for Johns Hopkins University's Center for Talented Youth summer program, where she teaches a college-level Paleobiology course to academically gifted 12- to 16-year olds in a three-week residential program. Recently, she was honored with the 2013 Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth Distinguished Alumni award.