Dr. Maegen Rochner is the current director of the Dendrochronology Fiend School and an associate professor from the University of Louisville Department of Geographic and Environmental Sciences. Her research focuses on the use of tree-ring data to reconstruct past climate and environmental conditions. This has included investigating over 1200 years of climate and environmental change in the Greater Yellowstone, reconstructing landslide activity in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and analyzing the impact of acid deposition on the growth synchrony and climate response of red spruce across southeastern Appalachia. Dr. Rochner’s recent research has focused on local and regional applications of tree-ring methods in Kentucky and throughout the southeastern US, including projects focused on (1) urban forests and their responses to urban heat and climate change and (2) tree-ring dating of local historic resources, such as cabins, buildings, and artifacts. A larger effort of Dr. Rochner’s lab is to investigate where human history, climate, and environmental change intersect in Kentucky, and other areas of the American southeast, through combined tree-ring and archival evidence. This effort includes the spatial and temporal extension of tree-ring networks using dendroarchaeological data.

Dr. Karen King is an assistant professor in the School of Geography, Development, and Environment at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona. She earned a PhD in Geography from the University of Idaho where he specialized in paleoclimate reconstruction and forest ecology. Dr. King's research interests focus on Quaternary landscape dynamics and paleoenvironmental reconstruction from intra-annual to multi-century time scales. After attending the 2018 DFS as a participant, Dr. King returned as a group leader for the 2019, 2021, 2022, and 2024 field schools. You can learn more her research by visiting her Google Scholar page.

Dr. Grant Harley is the associate dean of the College of Science and professor of geography in the Department of Earth and Spatial Sciences at the University of Idaho. He earned his PhD in Geography from the University of Tennessee where he specialized in paleoclimate reconstruction and biogeography. Grant’s research interests lie within the broad domain of physical geography, but focuses on climatology, biogeography, and paleoenvironmental reconstruction over the past ca. 2,000 years. He currently directs the Idaho Tree-Ring Lab, where they focus on integrating information about current and past climatic and ecological processes to better understand how natural resources (like plant communities and water) are likely to become altered in the future due to human-induced changes. Grant has conducted projects grounded in a variety of tree-ring applications including paleoclimatology, dendroecology, dendroarchaeology, and fire history. Grant first attended DFS as a participant back in 2009, and since then, he return as an instructor 9 times, focusing primarily on the introduction and climatology groups. To learn more about Dr. Harley's research, please visit his Google Scholar page.