Mary Chessman

Board Member

Mary grew up in Baltimore and went to Tufts University where she discovered that a path to spending lots of time outdoors was Geology.  She spent a summer hiking in Wyoming by attending field camp run by the University of Wyoming and Columbia in 1962.  She briefly worked for the USGS in Boston and then did lab work first at Harvard and then a longer time at MIT where she researched heat flow in the Geophysics Department.  The MIT stint allowed her to do a bit of field work.  Boston College found themselves short an instructor so she taught second semester introductory geology there.  This required quickly learning about how continental drift had changed the teaching of historical geology.  She had two daughters during this time and her husband’s career took them to the San Francisco Peninsula where she briefly worked at Stanford.  She spent a number of years doing marketing in the electronics industry.  This second career went from part time work at home to full time in later years.  She has enjoyed going back to her roots with the Geologists of Jackson Hole.