Emilia Jarochowska

Assistant professor at the Department of Earth Sciences, Utrecht University, The Netherlands

Emilia Jarochowska is an assistant professor at the Department of Earth Sciences, Utrecht University. She studied biology and geology at the University of Warsaw and could never stick to only one of them. She spent a lot of time doing fieldwork in Ukraine, observing how past biodiversity is determined by what becomes preserved the geological record and what doesn’t. She developed her own PhD project at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, where she started working on the earliest vertebrates with a mineralized skeleton: conodonts. She used these tiny fossils to understand the geological record and how it distorts our understanding of evolution. By teaming up with material scientists, Emilia and her PhD student Bryan Shirley discovered how crystals in conodont teeth are oriented to give maximum hardness and efficiency in biting. In her ERC Starting Grant, awarded in 2022, Emilia collaborates with the Netherlands eScience Center to build open software for simulating evolution and fossilization. Emilia contributes to the building of the Geological Time Scale and in 2024 she won the Hodson Award of the Paleontological Association. Emilia combines research and teaching with caring for her disabled mother. In her free time, she loves climbing and running (very slowly).