Allison Dingler grew up in Southern California, the daughter of a geologist and a teacher. Some of her fond childhood memories are helping her dad find just the right rock sample when exploring outdoors and helping set up her mom’s elementary classrooms when a new school year was about to kick off.

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Heading into college at UC San Diego, Allison chose to keep with the path that led outdoors. While in classrooms and labs more than outside, she finished with a B.S. in Earth Sciences.  During the later part of her undergraduate time, Allison took a research assistant job managing the small satellite station down the hill at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.  It was in these years that she found her eventual career path that mixed science, a fair bit of management, and some education. 

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She subsequently spent six years using satellite data to study Southern California earthquakes, collecting and analyzing seismic data from tectonic spreading centers around the Pacific Ocean, educating the science community on a value of integrating disparate data sets (think biology, chemistry, physics data brought together in a 3D visualization) to tell of more complete story of an environment, and organizing several grad student ski and camping trips to the Sierras. Allison left San Diego with a Ph.D. in Earth Sciences-Geophysics and a fellow grad student as her husband.
Since then, Allison has been based in Houston, TX, Baku, Azerbaijan, and now Durango, primarily working as a geophysical operations project manager. 

 

Outside of work, she’s an active mom of a daughter and a son (plus a dog and a cat).  Both kids have been in Montessori schools prior to moving to Durango and she’s now happy to a be part of the Durango Montessori community with her son. When not around the Smiley Building or working in her She Shed, she can be found doing, or at least trying, one of the many athletic or artistic activities Durango offers. 

Allison can be reached at allisondingler@durangomontessori.com