Dr. Yanan "Nancy" Li
Department of Geography
College of Liberal Arts
Texas
State University
"Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike. "
‒ John Muir
About me
I am an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at Texas State University, located in San Marcos, Texas. I am a physical geographer by training with emphases on paleoenvironmental changes, glacial geomorphology, and terrain analysis.
My past research projects mainly include climate oscillation studies using dendroclimatological methods in the Southeast U.S., and the timing and extent of the glaciers during the Little Ice Age in eastern Tian Shan, China. My research goal is to achieve a holistic understanding of how glaciers respond to the changing climate and consequently influence other geomorphic processes and human society. I am currently working on investigating recent glacier changes using satellite imagery, reconstructing Holocene glacier history with numerical dating techniques, and high-resolution monitoring of mountain glaciers.
I am actively seeking to recruit enthusiastic, creative, motivated, and hardworking prospective graduate students (both MS and PhD levels) to work together to better understand the changing world.
In front a drone camera, team members are celebrating a successful landing onto the glacier surface after a five-hour long trekking in rugged terrains. Location: western Tian Shan, China. July, 2019.
A small drone (Model: DJI Mavic 2) is tested at a valley glacier located in central Tian Shan in summer 2017, with my collaborator Dr. Ping Fu from the University of Nottingham Ningbo China.
Coring a Schrenk spruce (Picea schrenkiana), a species native to the Tian Shan region. Enough samples are collected for reconstructing the past climate from their > 300-yr annual ring record.
Using a Schimdt Hammer on rock surfaces at fore ground of the Urumqi Glacier No.1 site, to measure the hardness of the surface which reflects the magnitude of the weathering process.
Stable boulders on the moraines deposited by previous glacial advances are chiseled off about 1 kg for laboratory analysis of certain cosmogenic nuclides to reveal the age of the moraine formation.
