Dr. Helen Willemien Dow (maiden name: Beeson)

I am currently a Mendenhall Postdoctoral Fellow at the U.S. Geological Survey Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center in Santa Cruz, California. I am working with Amy East, Jon Warrick, and Joel Sankey to quantify sediment flux to nearshore environments in California in the context of global climate change. The rainy season in California has become shorter, sharper, and prone to greater inter- and intra-annual variability, thus exacerbating the likelihood of wildfires and post-wildfire flooding and debris flows. The Landscape Response to Disturbance project that I am part of is tackling how these changes in hydroclimate and fire regimes will translate to changes in sedimentation with both watershed management and coastal applications. 

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After graduating from UC Berkeley in 2007 with a degree in Integrative Biology, I worked for five years as a biologist and botanist in environmental consulting and environmental restoration. After spending many field seasons surveying beautiful creeks and rivers in California and Oregon, I realized I wanted to study the physical processes that shape the geomorphic template for life.

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In 2014 I received an MS in Geography from the University of Oregon. My thesis research, which was advised by Mark Fonstad, Josh Roering, and (unofficially) Rebecca Flitcroft (OSU), focused on how deep-seated bedrock landslides influence Coho salmon habitat in the central Oregon Coast Range.

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I earned my PhD in August 2019 from the University of Nevada at Reno where I worked with Scott McCoy to study how river channels and river networks respond to external forcing, how river basins form and evolve, and how river basin change can shape landscapes.

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I then took a postdoc in the Earth Surface Dynamics Group at ETH Zürich, where I worked with Sean Willett and Loïc Pellisier as part of a large, multidisciplinary group tackling the question of why mountainous regions tend to host high biodiversity. I coupled a mechanistic model for biodiversity with the group's landscape evolution model DAC, producing DAC-Bio, a model for the co-evolution of landscapes and life. Publication in the works!

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When I'm not working, you can find me surfing,  kayaking, camping, playing at the beach, or otherwise adventuring with my partner and daughter and enjoying our new home on the west side of Santa Cruz.