Presenting research findings on topics ranging from California deserts and southern Alaskan mountains to Antarctica and Mars, senior geology majors Ramona Smith, Maria Stefanis, and Hannah Thomas and 1997 geology alumnae Yarrow Axford and Salma Monani participated in the October annual meeting of the Geological Society of America (GSA). (Laura Levy '98 was also the senior author on an abstract for the meeting.) The GSA is the leading geoscience society in the country, and more than 5,000 geoscientists attended this meeting, which was held in Toronto, Ontario.
At the meeting, Axford was given GSA's Howard Award for the top master's thesis project in the country in Quaternary geology/geomorphology. She is working on her master's degree in geology at Northern Arizona University. Salma Monani is completing her master's degree in geology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and is focusing on research she did in Scotland.
"Undergraduate students do not commonly make presentations at this annual meeting, and the strong representation of current and former MHC students is unusual, admirable, and outstanding," noted Associate Professor of Geography and Geology Lauret Savoy. "The MHC geology faculty is active when it comes to pursuing research, and we make it a priority to involve students from project definition through publication." MHC students frequently present research findings at the regional GSA meetings and have also participated at the national meeting over the past ten years. All but one member of the geology department attended this year's GSA annual meeting and presented research results/abstracts of their own, in addition to those done with students. Three MHC faculty members chaired sessions at the conference.
"Our students conducted themselves in a professional manner," Savoy said, "and many people assumed the undergraduates were in graduate school because of the high intellectual level of their research and the quality of their presentations." As coauthors of abstracts with titles such as "Impact Crater Deposits at the Mars Pathfinder Landing Site" (Stefanis); "Interpreting Pleistocene History of Panamint Valley, Southeastern California, Using Gastropod Shells (Smith); and "Rare Earth Elements in Carbonates from Mono Lake, California and Pyramid and Walker Lakes, Nevada as a Tool for Paleoclimatic Analysis," (Thomas), it is easy to see why.
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