Starting this summer, Dartmouth’s Department of Earth Sciences will be known as the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences—a name the department has been working toward for decades.
The push into planetary science began in the mid-2010s, when the department made a deliberate decision to hire faculty whose research extends beyond Earth. That meant bringing in Marisa Palucis, whose research focuses on the early climate of Mars, alongside existing work by Mukul Sharma on methane production on planetary surfaces and the relationship between solar magnetism and terrestrial climate.
The department’s Earth-focused work kept pace alongside that expansion. Faculty members Justin Strauss, Brenhin Keller, and Sarah Slotznick all joined Dartmouth to work on past environmental change—on Earth and on other planetary bodies. Evans Family Distinguished Professor of Earth Sciences Mathieu Morlighem, an expert in ice sheet dynamics, reinforced the department’s strength in surface processes. And Elisabeth Newton, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy, joined Dartmouth in 2019 as an adjunct associate professor of Earth sciences, deepening ties between the two departments.
“Our name will now reflect what we actually do,” says Meredith Kelly, professor of Earth sciences and chair of the department. “We’ve been building toward this for about 20 years, and the research has genuinely grown to span both Earth and other planetary bodies.”
The new name also clears up some persistent confusion. Students, colleagues, and occasionally Dartmouth leadership have conflated the Earth sciences department with the Department of Environmental Studies. Kelly says the new name draws a clearer line. More recently, the renamed Department of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Studies became EERS, which sounds exactly like EARS, the Earth sciences department's longtime abbreviation. Under the new name, the department becomes EAPS.
External pressure played a role as well. NASA flagged that the department’s name didn’t reflect its planetary work. And in exit interviews with graduating seniors, the vast majority of students asked for “planetary science” in the name—both to distinguish the department from Environmental Studies and to better represent the scope of their degrees.
“Our students were telling us the same thing our funding agencies were,” Kelly says. “The name wasn’t keeping up with the work.”
Jane Lipson, associate dean for the sciences and the Albert W. Smith Professor of Chemistry, says the change is overdue. “Our faculty’s scholarly expertise and international reputation reflect their work encompassing planets beyond our own," she says. "The new name captures both the current reality and future aims.”
The proposal moved through the Science Divisional Council, Committee on Instruction, and Committee of Chairs before the full faculty voted to approve it in February 2025. The Board of Trustees approved the change shortly thereafter.