Nilo Bill
B.S., University of Miami
Ph.D., Oregon State University
Nilo is a geologist and climate scientist who seeks to understand abrupt and gradual changes in Earth’s ocean, atmosphere, and cryosphere across the globe and geologic time. The motivation behind these interests stems from a desire to place anthropogenic climate change in context with Earth’s natural climate variability.
While completing his PhD at Oregon State University, Nilo conducted fieldwork in Antarctica to investigate the retreat of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and its contribution to global sea level rise for which he received the United States’ Antarctica Service Medal. He then moved to a postdoc at University of Iceland as a National Geographic Explorer where he worked on understanding changes in atmospheric circulation in the Northern Hemisphere driven by ice sheet change.
Nilo is also highly involved in the geoscience education community, where he has recently published a new framework for teaching field-based geoscience at the undergraduate level for the National Association of Geoscience Teachers. Based on the principle that the real-world provides the most interesting and useful problems to solve, fieldwork plays a central role in his classes. As a NOLS Wilderness First Responder, Nilo takes teaching in the field seriously and has taught intensive multi-week geoscience field courses across many countries and landscapes.
What makes him most excited about teaching at Quest is the opportunity to think deeply about questions directly alongside students, and together land on impactful results.