Deborah K. Smith

Deborah Smith grew up in the cornfields of Illinois. She now travels to the far reaches of land and sea to investigate how volcanoes are built. She has hiked through tropical plants in Hawaii and Tahiti and over the cold, barren terrain of Iceland. She has mapped underwater volcanoes along a mid-ocean ridge at the location where one can’t be farther away from land and still be on the planet: halfway between New Zealand and South America. In an effort to share the experiences of scientists with the general public, she has developed a Web site that profiles the careers of women oceanographers.