#international

Our Guest: Jonathan Obrist-Farner

Jonathan Obrist-Farner

Visiting Professor at the University of Innsbruck and Fulbright Scholar
Summer term 2026

Home university / Country
Missouri University of Science and Technology / USA

Position
Assistant Professor of Geosciences and Geological and Petroleum Engineering

Research areas
Sedimentology, stratigraphy, and paleoseismology

Guest of
Michael Strasser

Department/Unit
Department of Geology

"Innsbruck is one of the strongest places in Europe for this kind of work, and the collaboration lets us compare methods and datasets directly."

 

I am visiting the University of Innsbruck because...

I am collaborating with Jasper Moernaut and Michael Strasser's sedimentary systems research group during my sabbatical. Our work overlaps closely. I study lake sediment records in Central America to reconstruct earthquake history and past climate, and their group brings expertise in high-resolution marine and lacustrine stratigraphy and sedimentary process studies. Innsbruck is one of the strongest places in Europe for this kind of work, and the collaboration lets us compare methods and datasets directly.
 

At the University of Innsbruck I will...

I am working with the sedimentary systems research group on lake sediment core analysis, comparing approaches to identifying earthquake-triggered deposits in lacustrine stratigraphy. We are discussing shared methods for dating and correlating event layers across different tectonic settings, and I am giving a talk on my research in Central American lake basins.

 

What fascinates me about scientific work is...

Lake sediments record decades to millennia of Earth history. Reading that record carefully lets us reconstruct earthquakes, droughts, and floods that occurred long before written history. Every core is like a puzzle, and every new dataset changes how I read the ones before it.
 

From Innsbruck I take home with me...

New methods for identifying and dating event deposits in lake sediments, a closer working relationship with a group doing outstanding sedimentology, and a good sense of how mountain lake systems compare to the tropical lakes I usually study. I also take home a strong appreciation for Innsbruck and its people. The four months spent here were absolutely incredible.
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