Roberta L. Rudnick is an American earth scientist and professor of geology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a world expert in the continental crust and lithosphere.Professor Rudnick was appointed a von Humboldt postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in 1987. She returned to the Australian National University as a research fellow in 1989. She worked with Ian Jackson and Dave Fountain on the lower continental crust. In 1994 Rudnick joined Harvard University as Assistant Professor, before being promoted to Associate in 1997. Her work on the evolution of the continental crust explored the andesitic composition of continental crust that cannot be produced by basaltic magmatism - the building blocks of the continental crust do not match the edifice.Professor Rudnick joined the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2000 where she she demonstrated that reactive transport causes kinetic isotope fractionation and demonstrated that ancient continents were rich in iron and magnesium. She also worked on geoneutrinos, helping physicists at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory and USArray identify whether neutrinos come from the core, mantle or crust of earth.Rudnick has served as editor-in-chief of Chemical Geology from 2000 to 2010. In 2012 she was made Department Chair. In 2015 Rudnick joined University of California, Santa Barbara as a Professor of Earth Sciences. She is working on the concentration of heat producing elements (potassium, thorium and uranium) in the continental crust to estimate the Moho temperature.Professor Rudnick was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2010 and was awarded the Dana Medal by the Mineralogical Society of America. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.