Carrie E. Schweitzer
Carrie E. Schweitzer
Carrie E. Schweitzer
Invertebrate Paleontologist
Carrie E. Schweitzer is an invertebrate paleontologist. She studies decapods (shrimp, lobsters, crabs, and relatives) as well as other crustaceans, researching their systematics, evolution, extinction, ecology, and biogeography.
Carrie grew up in Mantua, Ohio, a village located to the southeast of Cleveland. She and her family went camping near Lake Eerie when she was young, where she searched for fossils in Devonian (about 419 to 359 million years ago) limestone. Carrie’s profile photo at the top of this page shows her with a large rugose coral head preserved in the Devonian Columbus Limestone near Marblehead, Ohio.
Carrie attended Hiram College, a private college near her hometown. She earned both her master’s degree and Ph.D. from Kent State University (KSU) in Kent, Ohio. Afterwards, she took a position as a faculty member at KSU’s Stark Campus, a satellite campus in North Canton, Ohio; she is currently a Professor of Geology there. In 2019, she was instrumental in initiating a new Bachelor of Arts in Geology program for students attending KSU at Stark.
As a graduate student, Carrie worked on systematic studies of Paleogene fossil decapods from the West Coast. Since then, she has worked on nearly every continent collecting fossil decapod crustaceans. She is especially interested in crabs and anomurans (the group that includes hermit crabs) and their evolutionary radiations. In 2010, she and Kent State colleague Rod Feldmann described the oldest known shrimp from the Late Devonian (about 375 to 360 million years ago) of Oklahoma. Carrie, Rod, and others are currently hard at work on the revision of the Decapoda volume of the Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology.
From 2011 to 2015, Carrie served as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Association of Women Geologists. In 2013, she was given a KSU Outstanding Research and Scholar Award in recognition of her prolific research career. At that time, she was author on over 120 publications; since then, her list of publications has only grown, numbering over 200 as of 2021, including journal articles, book chapters, monographs, and chapters of the online Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology. She was named a Fellow of the Paleontological Society in 2018.
Daring to Dig Interview
In this video, Carrie talks about how she became interested in paleontology and the sexism that mid-career and middle-aged women face, as well as her advice for young women in paleontology. This interview was recorded in 2015. In 2021, Carrie noted that since her interview was recorded, her university has taken diversity and inclusion (D&I) more seriously. There are now many more women and people of color in administrative positions.
Selected works by Carrie E. Schweitzer
Feldman, R.M., and C.E. Schweitzer. 2010. The oldest shrimp (Devonian: Famennian) and remarkable preservation of soft tissue. Journal of Crustacean Biology 30: 629–635. Link
Schweitzer, C.E., R.M. Feldmann, and H. Karasawa. 2020. Systematic descriptions: Superfamily Parthenopoidea. Chapter 8T9 in P.A. Selden (ed.), Part R (Revised), Arthropoda 4, vol. 1, Crustacea. Treatise Online 131: 1–11, 5 figs.
Schweitzer, C.E., R.M. Feldmann, and H. Karasawa. 2020. Systematic descriptions: Superfamily Eriphioidea. Chapter 8T10 in P.A. Selden (ed.), Part R (Revised), Arthropoda 4, vol. 1, Crustacea. Treatise Online 132: 1–8, 3 figs.
Schweitzer, C.E., R.M. Feldmann, and M.M. Schinker. 2019. A new species of Cyclida (Multicrustacea; Halicynidae) from the Triassic of The Netherlands. Neues Jahrbuch für Geologie und Paläontologie Abhandlungen 293: 67–71. Link
Schweitzer, C.E., R.M. Feldmann, I. Lazăr, G. Schweigert, and O.D. Franţescu. 2018. Decapoda (Anomura; Brachyura) from the Late Jurassic of the Carpathians, Romania. Neues Jahrbuch für Geologie und Paläontologie, Abhandlungen 288: 307–341. Link
Further reading
Etzel, M. 2013. Kent State Geology Professor wins Outstanding Research and Scholar Award. eInside, 10 June 2013. Link
Lutton, L. 2017. Married professors tend to geology museum. Kentwired.com, 4 December 2017. Link
Main minion. 2010. 360 million-year-old shrimp. X-Ray Mag, 11 September 2010. Link
Seeton, M.G. 2019. Professor Carrie Schweitzer to lead new geology degree program. Kent State University Stark, 1 April 2019. Link
Video & audio content
Kent State University Alumni: Carrie E. Schweitzer, Geology of National Parks. Presentation by Carrie Schweitzer, Video, via Vimeo. Link
Palaeocast: Episode 96: Decapods. Audio, 1 January 2019. Link