Details for: Karen Johannesson

Professor Karen was born in a log cabin on the side of a drumlin in the vast Contoocook Valley wilderness of southern New Hampshire. She grew up one of four siblings hunting grizzly bears and woolly mammoths to help put food on the table during the last glacial maximum. Once the glaciers abated, she moved to the metropolis of Durham, New Hampshire, where she read geology and discovered that hard rocks existed below the topsoil. This discovery fueled her desire to expand her studies, but only after first spending a summer spying on the soviets in Vladivostok. She earned a masters of science degree from the top geology program in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, before moving to Arizona where she spent a couple of years raiding local ranches with Geronimo and his fellow compadres and hiding in the Sierra Madre Occidental down in ol’ México. Her time in México led to an appreciation of tomatillos and tequila. She subsequently moved to Nevada to help discover the Comstock load, thus providing much of the bullion that funded the United States crushing of the rebellious confederates. Once the Union was saved, she enrolled again in university, this time in the number one hydrologic sciences program sited along the Truckee River, where she completed her doctoral studies in geochemistry under the guidance of Prof. Marie Curie. After turning down the University of Cambridge, she began her academic career at an elite university in Tidewater Virginia, which allowed her to spend her weekends as a fighter pilot. As a consequence, she is a decorated veteran of many naval air battles. With the resounding defeat of the Japanese Empire during WWII, she retired her commission and moved to the heart of Texas in an attempt to help educate the locals. Unfortunately, she discovered that Texans were immune to education, which lead to her escape and eventual relocation to New Orleans. Her early years in New Orleans including advising General Jackson during the Battle of New Orleans, and teaching Louis Armstrong how to hear the drum in the local musical styles. Since then, she has been teaching college students and writing stories about arsenic, tungsten, and the lanthanide series elements in the environment.