Dear Alumni,

There have been a number of changes since our last newsletter in 2012 including the addition of a new undergraduate BS degree in Environmental Science and the name of the department to Geology and Environmental Science.  We have hired an additional 5 faculty (Eitan Shelef, Brian Thomas, Kyle Whittinghill, Danielle Andrews-Brown, and Shawn Wright), promoted Emily Elliott and Dan Bain to full time status, and have appointed a former alumni of the department, Shawn Wright, for a visiting assistant professor in the department.  Research activity is at an all time high with 38 active graduate students of which 26 are seeking a PhD, 4 postdocs, and 2 staff scientists.  There have also been a multitude of renovations to the building for new labs, offices, classrooms, a new teaching laboratory, and coming this summer a student lounge/study area.  Within the year we will occupy all of SRCC and spread further into Thaw Hall.

There were a number of noteworthy accomplishments by our faculty this year.  Mike Ramsey led a $168M NASA mission proposal entitled Infrared Continuity and Atmospheric Plume Experiment (ICAPE): Measuring the Global SO2 and Aerosol budget with Thermal Infrared Data from an Innovative Orbital Mission in conjunction with Southwest Research Institute and Arizona State University.  This was the largest proposal ever submitted at the University of Pittsburgh.  Nadine McQuarrie received an NSF grant to study the geometry of the active, earthquake producing fault in the Nepal Himalaya and completed her groups first field season in the Himalaya discovering a compelling relationship between the location and propagation direction of the earthquake and geometry of the active fault as reveled by the orientation and geometry of rocks at the surface.  Joe Werne received funding for a new NSF-supported multi-disciplinary collaborative project (with M. Abbott and E. Arkush in Anthropology), conducted field work for multiple externally funded projects (NSF & ICDP funding) with graduate and undergraduate students in three countries (USA, Canada, Mexico), and brought his analytical laboratory fully online and operational in support of these projects and others, while continuing to oversee and improve the Geology graduate program as DGS.  Dan Bain was a Sustainability Fellow at the MASCARO Center for Sustainable Innovation which created new research partnerships resulting in him being PI or CoPI on 6 proposals submitted to NSF and publishing 8 papers and submitting 5 others that are still in review.  Rosemary Capo and Brian Stewart conducted collaborative research related to unconventional shale gas geochemistry culminating in their co-editing a special volume of Applied Geochemistry entitled Geochemistry of Unconventional Shale Gas from Formation to Extraction: Petrogenesis, Hydraulic Fracturing, and Environmental Impacts.  Emily Elliott gave an invited keynote address at the 9th International Conference on Acid Deposition and her research group continues to publish novel research using stable isotope geochemistry to examine nitrogen fluxes across Earth system boundaries.  Mark Abbott co-led a 2.5 month long NSF-funded drilling project on Lake Junin in the Peruvian Andes recovering over 400 meters of sediments representing over a half million years of tropical climate change. 

We learn a lot about the many accomplishments of graduates from our conversations with you, but we need your help to get the word out to everyone.  We ask that you send us updates on any aspects of your professional and personal life you wish to share with your fellow alumni and you can do this online.  Our program is only as strong as the graduates it sends out into the world.

Please keep in touch!