7 Ostroski, Emily Guderian, Rawlings Akondi, Christopher Geyer, Stephanie Wisler, Mary Niles (MS) and Wes Rutelonis (undergraduate). I served on several MS and PhD thesis committees throughout the year. Please drop by to say hello when next in Stillwater or send me email if I can be of assistance to you. Estella Atekwana: Greetings to all alumni and friends! I hope this newsletter meets you all in good health. I keep saying that this is the year that I slow down. However, this never seems to happen. 2012 continued to be an extremely busy year for me as usual with lots of travelling. It was also a very exciting and productive year for me. We are winding down our activities related to the BP Deep Horizon Oil spill project. Hurricane Isaac demolished our geophysical monitoring system and we had to terminate our monitoring activities. We are now actively processing the data and should have results published shortly. We continue work on our Chevron grant. In August we presented the results of Year 1 activity to the remediation group at Chevron in San Ramon, California. It was very well received and our grant was renewed for another $250,000 for the second year. This project has given us the opportunity to critically examine biogeophysical signatures at organic rich contaminated field sites. We have submitted two papers for publication based on our results. In January I presented a talk to the Geophysical Society of Oklahoma City on “Petroleum Biogeophysics - from oil field microbial processes to oil bioremediation”. In May, I presented a talk at Stanford University on “Looking for Geophysical Signs of Life”. June found me in Botswana together with two OSU students – Kyle Obenberger and Khumo Leseane. We were joined in Botswana by Dr. Kevin Mickus of Missouri State and Dr. John Hogan and a PhD student from Missouri University of Science & Technology. This was the first field season of our NSF funded project on “Project for rift initiation development and evolution (PRIDE). PRIDE is a 4-year project to understand fundamental geodynamic processes that initiate continental rift zones. To learn more about PRIDE visit the project website: http://seismo.device.mst.edu/PRIDE/. I became an Associate Editor for the Journal of Geophysical ResearchBiogeoscience in August 2011. This has certainly kept me busy. I continue my work on AGU’s Sullivan Award Committee for Journalistic Excellence in the Science. If you have read a great science article recently, let me know and perhaps we can nominate the writer for this award. I also continue my work on SEG’s committee of special merits. I am also on the Advisory Board of the NSF sponsored Science and Technology Center "C-DEBI", The Center for Dark Biosphere Investigations at University of Southern California and the NSF Funded program in Forest Ecosystems at Alabama A&M University. PRIDE Research Team at Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. In October I spent two days at Monterey Bay attending a C-DEBI all hands workshop hosted by the University of Southern California as part of my Advisory board duties. I then flew to New Jersey for three days where I was co-convening a GeoPRISMS (Geodynamic Processes at Rifted and Subducting Margins) science implementation workshop. We selected key areas along different segments of the East African Rift System where more studies are needed to examine the role of fluids, volatiles, and preexisting structures on rift initiation. In December, I attended the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Annual meeting and my research group presented five papers. During the winter semester 2012, I taught a course on Electrical and Electromagnetic Methods in Exploration. I had a great group of students and we capped the course with a 2 1/2 day short course on magnetotelluric methods in exploration. We had a company representative from Geometrics Inc. in California offer the short course which also had a field component. MT techniques are increasingly being used in oil and gas exploration in frontier basins as well as for sub-salt and sub-basalt imaging. In the fall I taught a course in Introduction to Geophysical Exploration Methods. This course introduces students to the different geophysical techniques used in exploration. It includes a hands-on component that exposes the students to the different geophysical instruments including: seismic, gravity, electrical resistivity/induced polarization, magnetotelluric, different electromagnetic induction instruments, self potential and geophysical well logs, etc. We are now well settled in our new stateof-the-art biogeophysics facilities in the Henry Bellmon Research Center. It is a fantastic facility and I encourage you all to drop by for a visit so that we can show you around. I now have two PhD level research scientists (Dr. Igor Brown and Dr. Gamal Abdel Aal) working in the lab. My graduate students are all doing well. Sen Wei graduated in December and Cameron Ross defended in February. I have three new graduate students: Mercy Achang (PhD), Alan LePera (MS) and Brittany Ford (MS). On the home front, our kids continue to grow. Our oldest son Kyle is a senior at OSU studying Geology. Kyra is now a junior at Harvard University. She spent 10 weeks in Tanzania last summer working with a Harvard Global Health Program implementing best administrative practices in private health clinics throughout Tanzania. Kyne is now a 10th grader (and the tallest member of our family) at the Stillwater High School. He continues in the honor orchestra. Please drop by my office to say hello when next you are in town or send me an email if you have any questions regarding my research. Darwin Boardman: My research over the past year has revolved around Carboniferous conodont and ammonoid biostratigraphy and sequence stratigraphy. Included in my research is a published paper on Bashkirian-Moscovian boundary biostratigraphy: Pennsylvanian (Atokan) Ammonoids from the Magoffin Member of the Four Corners Formation, Easter Kentucky: Work, D. M., Mason, C. E., and Boardman, D. R., II, 2012: Journal of Paleontology, V. 86, No. 3, p. 403-416. Additionally, in conjunction with EOG Resources and the Oklahoma Geological Survey I have begun a joint research project of Pennsylvanian marine condensed sections of the Anadarko Basin in an attempt to develop a model for high resolution sequence stratigraphy. Field Work for this project has already been completed. Jared Morris a master’s student is helping in these research efforts as his thesis research topic. Field research into the Mississippian outcrops of the Ozark Plateau continues and several papers are near completion with
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