Dr. Stockton Maxwell is the current director of the Dendrochronology Field School. He is a professor and chair in the Department of Geospatial and Earth Sciences at Radford University in Virginia. He earned his PhD in Geography from West Virginia University where he specialized in paleoclimate reconstructions. As with many dendrochronologists, Dr. Maxwell has explored a variety of applications in dendrochronology including dendroecology, fire history, carbon isotopes, tropical dendrochronology, and paleoclimatology. His history with DFS began back in 2005 when he participated in the workshop as a master's student. Since then, he has instructed the workshop 10 times focusing primarily on dendroclimatology. In addition to DFS, Dr. Maxwell has helped establish the African Dendrochronology Field School in Zambia. You can learn more about Dr. Maxwell by visiting his website and Google Scholar page.

Dr. Karen King is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography and Sustainability at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Tennessee. 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. Karen King returned as a group leader for the 2019, 2021, 2022, and 2024 field schools. You can learn more about Kuurrn by visiting her Google Scholar page.

Dr. Maegen Rochner is an assistant 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. Grant Harley is the associate dean of the College of Science and associate 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.