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Copyright © 2007 Mount Holyoke College. This page created by MHC Web Strategy Team and maintained by Steve Dunn. Last modified on December 19, 2007. |
There
is an art to the teaching of science courses, and I strive to bring
my students the organizational tools needed to exploit the swirling cascade of data, inference
and conjecture that constitutes our knowledge of the world. Once
I have succeeded in bringing students to speed,
education becomes very exciting; my students become self-propelled
with enthusiasm for their subjects of study. I have a proprietary
interest in this process, for it is not long before these same students
begin to teach me new things. When students graduate, I feel pride
mingled with regret that I am about to lose the students I have
so enjoyed working with. I currently have a handful of especially promising student projects just waiting for the right people; if you are a motivated student interested in the most interesting problems in the earth sciences, talk to me now! 
I try to get students involved in research as soon as possible;
there is no better learning experience than to apply one's own talents
to a research problem that has never been addressed by anyone else
in quite the same way. To this end, students and I have worked together
on projects of mutual interest, with spectacular results. We have
presented papers at national geological meetings together, published
scientific articles together in major journals, and discovered important
fossil localities together, including the discovery of the locality
which has yielded the oldest known animal fossils in Sonora,
Mexico. One of my students co-authored publication recently received a favorable
citation in Science magazine, strong evidence that the work
of Mount Holyoke undergraduates is being taken seriously in the
wider world of science. These activities are a benefit to students
seeking admission to graduate school and seeking to fund graduate
work. They also impart skills which will be of great use in a variety
of work environments. I also try to practice what I preach, and
in addition to the discovery of the oldest animal fossils, my
work has led to the recognition and naming of the Proterozoic supercontinent
Rodinia, the definition of Hypersea, and
the bringing to light of a complete translation of Vladimir Vernadsky's
The Biosphere (edited by Mark McMenamin, 1998, Springer-Verlag/Copernicus),
a book absolutely vital for our understanding of the relationship
between life and geological process, and Cornielle Jean Koene's key work The Chemical Constitution of the Atmosphere From Earth's Origin to the Present . My latest book The Garden
of Ediacara: Discovering the Earliest Complex Life has triggered an informative and at times passionate debate about the meaning of evolution. 