Joann Stock
Associate Professor of geology and geophysics, California Institute of Technology

Joann Miriam Stock is an associate professor of geology and geophysics at the California Institute of Technology, where she is the only woman among 31 professors in the Division of Geology and Planetary Sciences. Originally from the suburbs of Boston, Stock is the second of eight children and was working afterr school and during the summer by the age of 12. In high school she liked math, science, art and languages.

Because there were more scholarships in math and science, she went to college at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she thought she might become an engineer or an architect. Stock found she liked physics, espeically geophysics, because of its importance to many problems such as earthquake hazards and disposal of toxic wastes. She was also attracted to its opportunities for field work and travel. Geophysicists often need help with field projects, and Stock was able to spend one summer during college working in Greece and two summers working in Peru.

After earning her B.S. in geophysics, Joann worked for the United States Geological Survey on earthquake-related studies. A few years after college she married another geologist, a fellow student at MIT. When Stock decided to return to school for a Ph.D., some of her relatives didn't understand her decision. If she already had a job and a husband, they thought, why would she want to go back to school? But her husband was very supportive; she finished her Ph.D. at MIT and took a job teaching at Harvard.

At Caltech Stock teaches, supervises graduate student research projects and does her own research. She has traveled to every continent, and has field projects in Mexico and Antarctica that involve geological mapping, deploying instruments for on-land measurements and geophysical surveys done from ships. Being the only Caltech professor who is both knowledgeable about earthquakes and fluent in Spanish, she sometimes does interviews for local Spanish-language television. In her free time Stock enjoys bicycling and going to the park or the swimming pool with her one-year-old daughter Gabriella and her husband, who is also a professor at Caltech.