Stephanie Drumheller

Stephanie grew up in eastern Tennessee. She translated a childhood love of fossils into a profound interest in how those fossils form. She attended the University of Tennessee for her BS in geology, then went to the University of Iowa for her PhD, which focused on modern and fossil crocodylian bite marks.

After receiving her doctorate, she returned to the University of Tennessee to join the teaching faculty in the Department of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences since 2013. Her current work focuses on how organisms interact with recent remains, an avenue of research that provides key evidence for the environmental conditions where extinct organisms lived, died, and were buried.

August 2026