Dr. Martin Pepper is an inherent tinkerer, inventor, and athlete. He is always outdoors flying, running, hiking, paddling, diving and swimming and was the 1996 NCAA national champion in the 100yd butterfly. He has his own machining and carpentry shop (Moosecrafts.com) and has built everything from houses to airplane parts. Martin has also designed and built many types of vehicles and machines for both research projects and novel tasks and used his gadgets to take on some of the most extreme self challenges to see if they could be done. These range from traveling 30,000 miles on a modified dirt bike circumnavigating South America in the dead of winter for his Ph.D. project, to kayaking the length of Finland, to swimming and hiking the 100-mile length of the Turks and Caicos Islands. He has also traveled the world working as a site manager and repairman for field schools and resorts while doing photojournalism and underwater photography on the weekends in such remote places as Papua New Guinea or Shark Bay in Australia (MartinPepperPhotography.com). Currently, when not in his shop, Martin also works part-time as a geochronological researcher at the University of Arizona's Laserchron Center that uses Laser Ablation Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry to gain ages of minerals like baddeleyite, zircon, and rutile.
Martin's Ph.D. was in structural geology and geochronology; his master's degree was in applied biology, and his bachelor's degrees are in both ecology, evolution, and biology (EEB) and psychology. All of these degrees have helped him keep an open mind when tackling his next challenge.
