Faculty Profile
Lisa D. Boucher
Associate Professor of Practice, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. Paleobotanist, curator, and field researcher reconstructing ancient landscapes through fossil leaves and wood.
Associate Professor of Practice, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. Paleobotanist, curator, and field researcher reconstructing ancient landscapes through fossil leaves and wood.
Lisa Boucher is a paleobotanist whose work bridges the gap between deep-time plant evolution and the modern landscapes we see today. Her research uses fossil leaves and wood to reconstruct Cretaceous environments, tracing how ancient plant distributions and responses to environmental change shaped the direction of plant evolution.
Before joining the Jackson School, Lisa held a tenured position as Associate Professor of Biology at the University of Nebraska-Omaha and completed postdoctoral research at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History. She brings more than a decade of experience managing field research programs, museum collections, and student mentorship across institutional and international boundaries.
At UT Austin, she serves as Curator and Director of Operations for the Non-vertebrate Paleontology Laboratory (NPL), where she oversees one of the nation's most significant fossil collections. Her work integrates research, curation, and teaching â training the next generation of geoscientists while expanding the reach and accessibility of irreplaceable paleontological specimens.
Lisa's scholarship spans paleobotany, evolutionary biology, and biogeography â using fossil evidence and modern analytical tools to understand how plants and landscapes co-evolved over millions of years.
Study of Cretaceous macrofloras using fossil leaves and permineralized wood to reconstruct ancient plant communities and their environments along the Western Interior Seaway.
Tracing how plant distributions and responses to past environmental changes â climate shifts, sea-level fluctuations â influenced the direction of plant evolution.
Mapping the geographic distribution of ancient and modern plant species, from New Mexico and Utah to Madagascar, to understand dispersal and diversification patterns.
Reconstructing past landscapes and ecosystems using sedimentary analysis, paleoclimate modeling, CT scanning, and multivariate statistical methods.
Microscopic analysis of fossil and extant plant structures â thin-sectioning, electron microscopy, and morphometric techniques for taxonomic and evolutionary studies.
Managing and digitizing major paleontological collections, with expertise in Specify databases, iDigBio portals, specimen conservation, and collections-based research.
Lisa's role spans research, curation, teaching, and laboratory leadership â advancing the paleontology programs at the Jackson School of Geosciences.