Lizzy graduated from Caltech in 2009 with a BS in Geology and then, after finishing her PhD at Stanford in 2014, returned to Caltech in 2015 to start as an Agouron Postdoctoral Fellow working with Woody Fischer, Mike Lamb, and John Grotzinger. She is interested in better understanding how different chemical sediments form (e.g. carbonates like ooids, siliceous rocks like chert and granular iron formation) in order to improve their utility as paleoenvironmental proxies. At Caltech, she has been using experiments and modeling to constrain abrasion rates of sand-sized chemical sand grains (e.g. ooids) and developing a new framework for thinking about ooid growth as process governed by the dynamic balance of chemical (i.e. precipitation) and physical (i.e. abrasion and transport) processes. She is also working on applying this process-based approach to other poorly understood chemical sediments like granular iron formation and hopes to eventually explain exactly how and why Neoproterozoic environments produced giant ooids.