Amy Leventer is the Harold Orville Whitnall Professor of Geology at Colgate University, where she teaches courses in Oceanography, Marine Geology, Paleoclimatology, Climate Change and Human History, and Science and Exploration. She completed her undergraduate degree in Aquatic Biology at Brown University in 1979, an M.S. in Marine Science from University of South Carolina in 1981, and her Ph. D. Geology in 1988 from Rice University under the direction of Rob Dunbar. She was the 1989 Byrd Fellow and a researcher at Byrd Polar from 1990-1994. Her research is in the field of understanding climate change since the last glacial maximum with a focus on the paleoclimatic and paleoceanographic history of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean. Her specialty is as a micropaleontologist, studying fossil diatoms, algae with a siliceous test that is especially well preserved in marine sediments around Antarctica. These data hold clues to the history of the presence or absence of sea ice and glacial ice, changes in oceanic paleo-productivity, and variations in oceanic circulation in the past. Since 1983, she has participated on over 25 research expeditions to Antarctica, most recently to the remote and rarely visited East Antarctic continental margin, and to Mercer Subglacial Lake as part of the Subglacial Antarctic Lakes Scientific Access (SALSA) project. Leventer and her husband met in Antarctica in 1986 and have two children.