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Robert James (Bob) Stern (born February 2, 1951) is an American geoscientist based in Texas.

He is Professor of Geosciences and Director of the Global and Magmatic Research Laboratory at the University of Texas at Dallas. He has more than 40 years of geoscientific research experience, studying active convergent margin processes and products in the Mariana arc system in the Western Pacific as well as ancient (900-550 million year old) crust exposed in the Arabian-Nubian Shield of Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel. He is expert on the geology of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex and the geology of Iran, and has made important contributions to the geology of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. These studies involve research at sea and on land. Geodynamic contributions include ideas about how new subduction zones form and the evolution of Plate Tectonics. He and his students and co-authors have published more than 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers; more information about these can be found on his Google Scholar profile. He is also interested in generating educational animations and videos of geoscientific processes, for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wJBOk9xjto. He is head of UTD Geoscience Studios https://utdgss2016.wixsite.com/utdgss. He shares supervision of the UTD Geosciences Micro-imaging lab with Dr. Ignacio Pujana.

Stern is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America and of the American Geophysical Union and is Editor-in-Chief of International Geology Review.

Bob was born Feb. 2, 1951 to Robert Joseph and Esther Juanita (Weigel) Stern in Sacramento, California. His father was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1921 and escaped with his family in the 1930’s; his mother was born in Harmony, Pennsylvania in 1916. In 1957 the Stern family including sisters Mary Ellen (deceased), Sandra Sue, and Joan Lynn moved to Oroville, a small town in the Sierra Nevada foothills of northern California where the Oroville Dam was being built, where his father bought a Ben Franklin Store. The children completed their educations through 12th grade there. Bob worked in his father’s store and was active in Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts, attaining the rank of Eagle Scout. He played football for 4 years at Oroville High School. Stern went to UC Davis, majoring first in Political Science before dropping out for a year and returning to major in Geology, graduating with honors in 1974. Stern undertook graduate studies at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, undertaking the first of his many marine geoscientific research cruises, beginning with the EURYDICE cruise in 1975 aboard the R/V Thomas Washington, from Majuro back to San Diego. In 1976 he made the first of many field trips to study the volcanic rocks of the Mariana island arc. In 1977 Stern began his PhD studies in the Precambrian rocks of the Eastern Desert of Egypt under the supervision of Prof. A.E.J.Engel. Also in 1977, Bob married Melissa Byer Fenton and that year their first child, Ryan, was born in San Diego. Stern defended his PhD dissertation "Late Precambrian Ensimatic Volcanism in the Central Eastern Desert of Egypt" in Sept. 1979. From Sept. 1979 to January 1982, Stern was a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, Carnegie Institution of Washington, carrying out isotopic studies of Egyptian and Mariana igneous rocks. Daughter Rebecca was born in 1980 in Maryland, the same year that he was diagnosed with Charcot-Marie-Tooth Syndrome, a neurological disorder. In Jan. 1982, Stern joined the faculty of Programs in Geosciences at the University of Texas at Dallas, rising through the ranks from Assistant Professor to Professor. Daughter Alexis was born in 1983. He teaches a required undergraduate course in Igneous and Metamorphic Petrology and a required graduate course in Tectonics, along with various elective undergraduate and graduate courses. Stern’ research concerns several disciplines, field areas, and topics. Disciplines include tectonics, igneous geochemistry, isotope geochemistry, and geochronology. Field areas include the Izu-Bonin-Mariana arc system in the Western Pacific, NE Africa and Arabia, Iran, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Permian Basin of Texas and New Mexico. He has carried out field studies in Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Jordan. Stern has led or participated in many marine geoscientific expeditions in the Mariana convergent margin, exploring most of the submarine arc volcanoes by dredging and ROV studies; deeper regions in the backarc basin and forearc have been studied by dredging and diving with manned submersible. Topics include studies of subduction, ophiolites, convergent margin tectonics and magmatism, subduction initiation and the evolution of plate tectonics on Earth. Stern served as Geosciences Dept. Head from 1997 through 2005. He has carried out sabbatical and summer research at Stanford, Caltech, and ETH.