Had someone told Larisa DeSantis that in 2025, she’d be a Guggenheim Fellow writing a book about protecting Earth’s future using knowledge gained from the fossils she loved as a kid, the conservation paleobiologist probably wouldn’t have believed them.
Her long-standing love of fossils began during childhood—compliments of the La Brea Tar Pits in her hometown of Los Angeles—and followed her to UC Berkeley, where she began studying natural resource management and paleontology. But DeSantis, now an associate professor of biological sciences and of Earth and environmental sciences at Vanderbilt University, decided that preserving life on the planet was her true calling, so she shifted her focus away from paleontology.
She went on to earn a master’s in environmental management in conservation biology at Yale—though she still dabbled in paleontology and museum education. That path that led to her work at the American Museum of Natural History, where she brought a moveable museum of fossils to local schools. From there, she became determined to bridge the divide between paleontology and modern conservation.
“My research really came from a struggle… from trying to choose between my passion for studying the past and my desire to conserve species for the future,” DeSantis says.
These days, DeSantis gets to have her prehistoric cake and eat it too. Her research at Vanderbilt sits at the intersection of geology and biology. She uses fossils to understand how environments have changed over time, and she distills lessons from that information into strategies for modern conservation efforts.
“With the fossil record, we can look at periods of dramatic climate change such as aridification (the drying out of a region) on the planet and begin to clarify the effects of those events,” DeSantis explains. “As climates change from wetter to drier periods, for example, these abiotic events influence what animals can eat, where they can live, and their ecology. Clarifying the past can help us better understand what options species may have in the future and even get creative about potential management plans.”
DeSantis’ research is increasingly relevant to humanity’s simultaneous climate and biodiversity crises. With support from Princeton University Press—who awarded her a book proposal grant—and from the Guggenheim Foundation, she’s channeling her life’s work into a book.
In a first-person account tentatively titled Decoding the Dead: Revealing Our Past to Conserve Our Future, DeSantis will traverse 65 million years of Earth’s history—from the last days of the dinosaurs to the dawn of the “Age of Mammals”—spotlighting recent and new scientific discoveries by researchers, many of whom have been traditionally excluded from the narrative in earth and biological sciences.
“In the College of Arts and Science, we understand the value of research that uniquely crosses disciplines, and Larisa’s scholarship does exactly that,” says Timothy P. McNamara, Searcy Family Dean of the College of Arts and Science. “From her multidisciplinary lens, she has transformed how we understand the Earth’s history, our current environment, and how we might preserve our planet for the future. She is extremely well-deserving of the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, and I am grateful for her contributions to the college, the university, and the field more broadly.”
As a Guggenheim Fellow, DeSantis will receive a stipend to bring her vision to life. It will allow her to collaborate with scientific illustrators to craft new visions of ancient landscapes and visit other researchers’ labs to document their discoveries.
“It’s a huge honor and I am over the moon,” DeSantis says. “I have a responsibility to communicate what we have learned from the past—and why it’s important to our future.”
