Tammy Rittenour is a Professor in the Department of Geosciences at Utah State University, where she directs the USU Luminescence Laboratory. She earned her BA in Geology and Biology from the University of Minnesota-Morris in 1996, an MSc in Geosciences from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 1999, and a PhD in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2004. Tammy’s research integrates geomorphology, sedimentology, stratigraphy, and geochronology to reconstruct past climate and landscape evolution from river, sand dune, glacial, and geoarchaeological records. She is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America and has received the NSF CAREER Award and the Kirk Bryan Award for Excellence in Geomorphology. Her research interests center on using luminescence dating to establish chronological controls of sedimentary deposits.

At NWLDW 2025 Dr. Rittenour will give the lecture "Quartz luminescence sensitivity: Insights from global distributions and local fingerprints of fire and residence time within the Critical Zone".

Mayank Jain is a Senior Researcher and Section Leader in the Department of Physics at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). With a background that bridges physics and geology, Mayank's research spans Radiation Physics, Solid State Physics, and Earth & Environmental Sciences. His work has focused on broadening the application of optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) and enhancing its precision, accuracy, and age range through a detailed investigation of charge transport dynamics in both natural minerals and their synthetic counterparts. Mayank’s contributions have been instrumental in advancing models of metastable states and charge transport in minerals, leading to pioneering measurement techniques and applications in Earth sciences.

His lecture at NWLDW 2025 is entitled "Multi-scale luminescence Imaging: Illuminating weathering, erosion and transport dynamics in clastic systems"

Nathan Brown is an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, where he built and directs a luminescence dating laboratory. He received his MS in 2011 from the University of Illinois in Chicago, dating North American loess deposits with thermally-transferred OSL (TT-OSL) techniques, under the supervision of Steven Forman. In 2017, he received his PhD from UCLA under the supervision of Ed Rhodes and Mark Harrison, where he developed K-feldspar thermoluminescence (TL) signals for low-temperature thermochronology applications. He was then a postdoc at UCLA with Seulgi Moon and an NSF Fellow at UC Berkeley with David Shuster prior to joining UTA in 2020. His research interests include numerical modelling, luminescence sediment dating, rock surface exposure dating, and thermochronology, especially in challenging geologic contexts. Some current field sites are the southern San Andreas fault system, beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet, hydrothermal explosion deposits in Yellowstone National Park, and ventifact sites across the Mojave Desert.

Expect to hear Dr. Brown talking about thermochronology in our conference! His lecture is entitled "Luminescence thermochronology shows a transient landscape response to a changing southern San Andreas fault"