Tanya Atwater (born 1942) is an American geophysicist and marine geologist who specializes in plate tectonics. She is particularly renowned for her early research on the plate tectonic history of western North America. Early life and education Atwater was born in Los Angeles, California in 1942. Her father was an engineer and her mother was a botanist. Atwater was one of the first women to research the ocean floor in terms of its geology. Atwater began her education in 1960 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then received her B.A. in geophysics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1965. She earned a Ph.D. (1972) in marine geophysics from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego. She is director of the University of California, Santa Barbara Educational Multimedia Visualization Center where she is an emerita professor of geological sciences. She was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining the faculty at UCSB in 1980. Atwater retired from UCSB in 2007. Career Atwater was a professor of tectonics, in the Department of Geological Sciences, now the Department of Earth science, at the University of California, Santa Barbara before retiring. She authored and co-authored 50 articles in international journals, professional volumes, and major reports. Seven of these papers were published in the journals Nature or Science. In 1975, she became a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union for her work in tectonophysics. From 1975 to 1977, Atwater was a Sloan Postdoctoral Fellowship Recipient in Physics. In 1984, she won the Encouragement Award from the Association for Women Geoscientists. Atwater is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences elected for her contributions to marine geophysics and tectonics. In 2019 she received the highest award of the Geological Society of America, the Penrose Medal. In 2022 she received the Wollaston medal from the Geological Society of London, its highest award. Scientific discoveries Atwater was involved in oceanographic expeditions using deep towed instruments to explore the ocean floor. To date, she has participated in 12 deep water dives in the deep-ocean submersible Alvin. She researched the volcano-tectonic processes responsible for creating new oceanic crust at seafloor spreading centers. In 1968, she co-authored a research paper featuring groundbreaking work into the faulted nature of spreading centers. With Jack Corliss, Fred Spiess, and Kenneth Macdonald, she played key roles in expeditions that uncovered the distinct biology of ocean floor warm