RESEARCH
CURRENT CV
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Here you’ll find links to some of my recent publications.
Contact me if you need a PDF of a full paper.
BOOKS IN PROGRESS
Our Natural Lab: Remarkable Stories of Science from America’s National Parks
Under contract for 2026 release with Oxford University Press!
Few aspects of our nation unite Americans more than national parks. Lauded by writer Wallace Stegner and documentarian Ken Burns as “America’s best idea,” accounts of their cultural history and inspirational scenery abound. Yet their illustrious scientific history remains largely untold. How many people know that DNA testing owes its origins to a heat-loving bacterium swimming in Yellowstone’s famous hot springs? Or how the shockingly contaminated soil of a Yosemite canyon – seemingly dozens of miles from known human influence – alerted the country to the threat of lead belching from our vehicle exhausts? This book of 12 chapters forwards the argument that America’s national parks hosted – and continue to host – some of the most important scientific achievements of recent history.
Nature’s New Narrative
My second book, in progress, forwards a provocative hypothesis: measurable linguistic changes in documentary storytelling demonstrate a paradigm shift in how we communicate science and nature.
Using linguistic analysis to examine closed captioning data files from more than 1000 film and television documentaries since the 1990s, there are considerable shifts across several meaningful metrics…
You’ll find some research excerpts from the book here, including 1) a conference presentation examining BBC nature series such as Planet Earth; and 2) a word cloud capturing the most frequently used words across 607 programs containing 3 million words.
Stay tuned – more to come soon!
Favorite site for Apollo astronaut geology training
Psychologist Yang Bai’s field research here found that visitors were less individually focused and more collectively oriented after being awestruck by Yosemite Valley
Robert B. Lull, Ph.D. 