Katharine Cashman is a volcanologist who studies links between chemical and physical factors that control magma ascent, eruption, and emplacement on the Earth’s surface. She has studied volcanoes on all seven continents and explored a wide range of eruption styles. She is best known for her work that links the kinetics of bubble and crystal formation to the behaviour of volcanic materials, but has worked on problems that span from the chemical to physical to social aspects of volcanism. She has worked with all the US volcano observatories and served on the Scientific Advisory Committee for the island of Montserrat.

Professor Cashman received her doctorate from The Johns Hopkins University and taught at Princeton University and the University of Oregon, USA, before moving to the UK in 2011 as an AXA Research Professor at the University of Bristol. In 2014 she was awarded an AXA Endowed Chair in Volcanology at Bristol. She is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a member of the Academia Europaea, and has received a Royal Society Wolfson Merit Award.