Image of olivine through a polarizing mcroscope.
Thermal infrared image showing upwelling plumes along the California coast
Geosciences News
Lisa White Awarded New Collaborative NSF Grant (9/1/09)
The SF-ROCKS program (Reaching Out to Communities and Kids with Science in San Francisco) is expanding beyond the Bay Area with a new National Science Foundation grant! The goal of the new program, METALS (Minority Education Through Traveling and Learning in the Sciences), is to create meaningful geoscience experiences for high school students through experiential learning in National Park field settings. METALS evolved, under the direction of Lisa White, from a strategic alliance between SF-ROCKS and geoscience diversity programs at the University of New Orleans, the University of Texas at El Paso, and Purdue University. The collaboration will provide multi-year experiences for high school students (grades 9-12) from urban and rural areas who are underrepresented in the geosciences, including African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native Americans, and Native Pacific Islanders. The project plan and activities include instructional field trips for 40 high school students selected from each of the four university areas. The field trips, to different National Park regions each year, will explore California and the Pacific Coast, the Colorado Plateau and Southwest, the northern Rocky Mountains and Great Plains, and the Gulf Coast. Professors and graduate students from each university will lead field seminars designed to connect underrepresented students with a deeper understanding of how Earth science processes impact local communities, and how place-based understanding of landscapes varies among cultures. The 4-year NSF collaborative award to San Francisco State, University of New Orleans, University of Texas at El Paso, and Purdue University totals $1,499,967.
Lisa White Gives 2009 Commencement Address at UC Santa Cruz (6/12/09)
Professor of Geology, member of our faculty, and UC Santa Cruz graduate alumna, Lisa D. White delivered the keynote address (Providing inspiration and changing lives through collaborations in science) at UC Santa Cruz’s 43rd Graduate Commencement ceremony on Friday, June 12, 2009. Lisa is currently the Associate Dean of the College of Science and Engineering as well as Professor of Geology at San Francisco State University. Lisa continues to actively contribute to the department by teaching Earth and Life Through Time and Graduate Seminar in Geoscience. Throughout her 20-year faculty and administrative career with us, Lisa has been active in efforts to increase diversity in the Earth sciences. She is the director of San Francisco State’s SF-ROCKS (Reaching Out to Communities and Kids with Science in San Francisco), an NSF and NOAA funded project founded in 2001that engages public high school students in the Bay Area. SF-ROCKS has allows students to gain hands-on experiences in Earth and Environmental Sciences through research projects and training. In October 2008 Lisa was named as the inaugural recipient of the Geological Society of America's Bromery Award for Minorities, an honor bestowed upon a geoscientist who demonstrates the commitment and drive to help minorities achieve success while maintaining a strong record of research and service to the geologic community..
Three graduate students awarded GSA Research Grants (4/09/09)
Graduate students Erika Amir, William Hassett, and Deborah Shulman have been awarded Research Grants by the Geological Society of America for 2009. Erika Amir was awarded $3,750 to complete her field work in Death Valley and U-Th/He thermochronology to study the Plio-Pliestocene exhumational history of the Black Mountains. William Hassett was awarded $2,890 to support field work in the Indian Himalaya and complete Nd and Pb isotopic analyses on Miocene granites collected there. Deborah Shulman was awarded $2,690 to support field work in the Lofoten Islands of northern Norway to study deformation and metamorphism in lower crustal rocks including using EBSD on the College of Science and Engineering's new scanning electron microscope.
Mary Leech Awarded $507,264 NSF Faculty Early Career Development Grant (1/07/09)
This 5-year NSF-CAREER project has two parts: 1) a research project that focuses on the role of granite melts in large-scale continental collisional processes in the Himalaya, the results of which will support or refute ductile mid-crustal channel flow as a viable model for the Himalaya; and 2) an education plan that creates partnerships between SF State geosciences students and grade 3 to 6 teachers in San Francisco to develop curricula to meet California science standards for instruction. The main goal of the research project is to test the "channel flow" model that predicts granite melts of Indian crust thrust beneath the Tibetan plateau are gravitationally-driven south to the topographic erosional front of the Himalaya. The education plan for this project creates a new course at San Francisco State University, "Science Education Partners in Geosciences", that will partner undergraduate and graduate students in Geosciences with grades 3 to 6 teachers to co-develop and co-teach lessons in San Francisco Unified School District classrooms. For more information, see http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=0847721
Lisa White Wins 2008 GSA Bromery Award for the Minorities (11/1/08)
The Bromery Award recognizes the outstanding education and service contributions and commitment to the advancement of minorities that characterized Bill Bromery’s career. No person is more appropriate to receive the first Bromery Award than Dr. Lisa White, who has demonstrated the same commitment and drive to help minorities achieve success while maintaining a strong record of research and service to the geologic community.
Mary Leech Awarded $783,210 NSF Grant (8/27/08)
Mary Leech, along with Co-PIs: A. Ichimura, B. Manning, W. Denetclaw, K.-S. Teh, has received a major research instrumentation grant from the NSF totalling $783,210. The grant will be used to purchase a high-resolution scanning electron microscope with EDS, EBSD, STEM, and CL capabilities. Mary and her co-PIs anticipate the SEM will be installed and ready for use in mid-2009, greatly expanding faculty and student research opportunities in Geosciences, Chemistry, Biology, Physics and Engineering. For more information, see http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=0821619.
Petra Dekens Awarded NSF Grant (7/25/08)
Petra Dekens has been awarded an NSF grant for $230,808. She'll be reconstructing a 5 million year record of sea surface temperatures and subsurface conditions in a site in the south Atlantic subtropical gyre. The work will address questions about the link between the subtropical gyres and the tropical oceans through the ventilated thermocline, and the role that changes in that link played in the transition from globally warm condition of the Pliocene to the much colder Pleistocene.
John Monteverdi's Field Tornado Research 2008 (5/15/08)
John Monteverdi posts a Blog of his field research each year. His research has led to over ten publications in the referreed literature, including several with his students. Here's a link to his blog/diary from the trip in May and June of 2008.
Karen Grove Leads Student Expedition to Andean Cordillera (1/10/08)
In 2006 Karen spent 6 months living in Chile as a Fulbright Scholar. She worked in the geology department at the Universidad de Chile in Santiago and was also able to travel throughout the country. For geologists, it's an amazing place and she wanted to share it with students from San Francisco State. Karen was "jjazzed" that 18 SFSUers decided to accompany her to South America to explore the Andes. Here's the website that documents this successful student expedition into the Andean Cordillera.
