Isabel P. Montañez

Isabel Patricia Montañez is a paleoclimatologist specializing in geochemical records of ancient climate change. She is a Distinguished Professor and a Chancellor's Leadership Professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at University of California, Davis. As of 2021, Montañez is the Director of the UC Davis Institute of the Environment.

Montanez was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2021. She is a fellow of the Geological Society of America (elected 2003), The Geochemical Society and The European Association of Geochemistry (2016), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2012), AGU (elected 2020), and received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship in 2011. Other notable awards include:

Although much of her work is regarding geochemistry and paleoclimatology, she also has published articles regarding paleontology and has worked towards the completion of the dinosaur fossil record. In 2011, in collaboration with other scientists she wrote about the discovery of a basal dinosaur "from the dawn of the dinosaur era in southwestern Pangea." In this work, unlike most of her other articles she describes the dinosaur found and where and when it could have been found. The article also talks about the affect of fauna 230 million years ago, as dinosaurs existed as the largest carnivores and smallest herbivores. An important point made was the idea that the extinction of nondinosaurian herbivores was not caused by an increase in dinosaur diversity. This idea challenged the previously accepted notion that dinosaurs ascended the food pyramid due to opportunism.

Montañez started as an assistant professor of geology in the Department of Earth Sciences, University of California, Riverside in 1990 and was promoted to associate professor in 1995. She moved to the Department of Geology (now the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences) at the University of California, Davis in 1998 where she continues to work as a professor. She was the President of the Geological Society of America from 2017 to 2018. She is also a role model for women in science in general, and Latina scientists in particular.

Montañez attended Bryn Mawr College where she majored in geology and graduated with B.A. in 1981. After Bryn Mawr, she worked as a consultant and then as a museum technician for the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History where she became interested in ancient climate change. She went on to work with Fred Read at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and was his first woman graduate student. She earned her Ph.D. in geology in 1989.

Isabel Montañez was born in Geneva, Switzerland, to a Swiss mother and a Colombian father. As a child, she moved to Manchester, England, and then in 1969 to Pennsylvania, United States. She enjoyed and excelled at math and science as a child and was encouraged to become a geologist by an inspiring teacher.