Delores Robinson
Delores Marie Robinson is an American geologist and tectonist who serves as a professor and department chair of Geological Sciences at the University of Alabama. Her research focuses on how mountain belts form and change, with a special look at the Himalayas, including Western Nepal, India, Bhutan, and Southern Tibet. She studies how orogenic systems grow from early volcanic arcs.
Education: She earned a Bachelor of Arts in geology from Guilford College in 1994, with a project on gravity and magnetics of diabase dikes in Jamestown, North Carolina. She earned a Master’s degree from Vanderbilt University in 1997, studying magma chamber dynamics in the Aztec Wash pluton. She earned a PhD from the University of Arizona in 2001, researching the tectonics of Western Nepal and creating a geological map during fieldwork.
Career: Robinson began as a structural geologist at BP in Alaska. She joined the University of Alabama faculty in 2003 and was promoted to Professor and Department Chair in 2010. Her work connects rock structure, sedimentation, tectonics, and erosion using field mapping, thermochronometers, geochronometers, and isotopes to understand fold-and-thrust belts and how mountain belts evolve. She also uses rocks and seismic data to search for hidden hydrocarbons.
Personal: She is married and has four children.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 05:14 (CET).