Michele L. Cooke is a professor of earth, geographic and climate sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass). She researches fault evolution in the Earth’s crust using numerical models, laboratory experiments and geophysical data. Cooke’s collaborative research integrates these approaches to illuminate how faults grow, which helps us constrain the hazard of damaging earthquakes. She is a fellow of the Geological Society of America. In 2018, Cooke earned the UMass College of Natural Sciences Outstanding Research Award. In her acceptance speech for that award, Cooke highlighted how her deafness has made her a better scientist.