Dr. Holmberg is an archaeologist who specializes in volcanism as a way to examine long-term intersections humans have had with environmental change. Her main interests lie in the creative integration of Earth and social science data and vantages to better understand risk, the role of prehistoric and contemporary art in representing climate changes, and how the environmental past informs the present and future.

She holds a PhD from Columbia University and has taught about environmental disaster and perceptions of nature in the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown and the Archaeology Center at Stanford. She has done archaeological and ethnographic fieldwork in Athens, Belize, Hawaii, Papua New Guinea, Panama, and the eastern United States, informal fieldwork in Brazil and Antarctica, and is beginning a new field project in Patagonia in a rock art cave under a volcano that has erupted for 18,000 years continuously along a coast with 60 meters of sea level rise during human use of the landscape.