Alison Duvall is a geologist who studies how mountains are built and how the landscape responds to these processes. More specifically, she looks at how plate tectonics, erosion, and climate all work together to shape the Earth’s surface across both space and time. In addition to mountains, she investigates what happens when two blocks of Earth’s crust slide past each other (called strike-slip faulting), changing hill slopes, river channels, and other features of the landscape. Because they are often continuous for long distances, strike-slip faults are especially prone to large earthquakes, but measuring their activity is hard. Duvall hopes to develop new ways of both recognizing and analyzing fault activity directly from surface processes.