Originally from Hamilton, Ontario, Professor Peter Fawcett earned an undergraduate degree in geology at McMaster University before attending graduate school at Penn State University. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto, he joined the UNM faculty in 1997. He has served as chair of the department of Earth & Planetary Sciences for the last eight years.

Classically trained as a geologist, but with a strong emphasis on an interdisciplinary approach in teaching and research, Dr. Fawcett has worked with a diverse group of earth scientists, biologists, chemists, physicists to study past climate change and its impact on the environment. He has served as principal investigator on three large, continental scientific drilling projects recovering climatic and environmental records from lake sediments from the Valles Caldera in New Mexico, Stoneman Lake, in Arizona, and a large international research group drilling the ancient lake sediments than now underlie Mexico City (Lake Chalco).