13 Jordan Harding. The workshop started with a casual introduction and the teachers were asked to draw a “geologist.” I was amazed to know how we are perceived by the general community - from trench diggers to rock dwellers; everything I could imagine was there. The teachers had a great time attending the field trip led by Jack Pashin, doing hydrology led by Todd, and watching 3-D graphics in Mohammed’s lab. One afternoon Bret Danilowitcz joined us for lunch. The teachers opened their hearts. It was concerning and a bit heart-breaking to learn that some of the middle schools in Oklahoma have not been able to update their textbooks in the last five years because of the lack of funds. I have a better appreciation of the crowd that I face three times a week in Geology 1014. On the research side, I was able to win an OCAST grant. This is a state-sponsored program to fund projects that directly contribute to economics of Oklahoma. My collaborator in this grant is Ranji Vaidyanathan from the Dept. of Mechanical Engineering. The proposal will develop a lab for stress-shadow experiments, which could be an important consideration in fracking. The basic idea is rooted in the observation that a zone impacted by a large earthquake is not hit by another earthquake for a long period of time. Between “history repeats itself” and “lightening does not strike…” seismologists realized that when the fault is deformed it turns nearby zone into plastic. It is possible that fracking leaves behind a large volume of hydrocarbons within the shadow of the stimulated fractures. The facility is being built on the Tulsa campus and we hope to be able to run our first experiments by the end of this year. First results from Mississippian consortium were shown to the sponsors; it seems like we will be getting more data. I have been teaching two courses on an annual basis – Introduction to Exploration Seismology and Geology and Human Affairs (geology for non-geologists). The former course typically has 12 students and the latter one has 200. This year I will also be co-advising the seismic interpretation with Eva Peza. The seismic group continues to grow. I have three PhD and six Masters students. The group has become quite diverse. From rock physics to ground roll inversion, the students’ interests are becoming more and more diverse every year. This year I had a visiting student in the summer from India on an internship and another sponsored by the Chinese government to spend one year of his PhD with me working on gas hydrate. Another notable achievement included Khemraj, my PhD student, and his teammate ended up third in the international challenge bowl conducted by SEG; a large collaborative experiment (with Stanford, Geokinetics, and iSeis) on rotational sensors. Look for an upcoming paper in Geophysics on 18-C seismic (6 kinds of motion recorded by tri-directional source). I hope 2014 to be a prolific year. I am looking forward to it and so are my students. Do call upon me when you swing by Stillwater again. I would love to give you a tour of the computation seismology lab. Dr. Daniel A. Laó Dávila Last year was an exciting year at the Boone Pickens School of Geology. We have a new Head, new collaborations, and an expanding department. Our faculty and graduate students are performing at a higher level and the future looks bright with the addition of two new faculty members. I enjoyed my teaching very much as I interacted with 220 students from the Geology and Human Affairs course and 34 students from the Structural Geology course. I was co-author of poster titled "Using a geoscience blog to provide research-based, contextual, and culturally-relevant geoscience information to a Spanishspeaking audience" at the Geological Society of America-Southeastern Section Meeting held March 20-21 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. I also presented a poster titled "Kinematic model of the Northern Puerto Rico Fault Zone: Transpression, Strain Partitioning and Lateral Extrusion" at the GSA Annual Meeting held in Denver, CO Oct. 27-30. In addition, a proposal to study incipient rifting in Malawi was submitted to the National Science Foundation, and a review paper on the Collisional Zones in Puerto Rico and the northern Caribbean has been submitted for publication. Student research is very active. Erin Roherig successfully defended her thesis titled "Petrography, Mineralogy, and Serpentinization of the Río Guanajibo Serpentinite Body, Puerto Rico" and is now employed in Marathon Oil as an exploration geologist. Louis Steigerwald won a prestigious Wentz Project Scholarship, which will support his undergraduate research project of mapping active faults in central Oklahoma. He will present his research at the next Annual Meeting of the GSA South Central Section to be held next year on March 18 in Fayetteville, AK. The outlook for this year seems promising as the Tectonics and Geophysics Group continues to grow in participants and collaboration. Our studies will continue to focus on strain partitioning and localization in young continental rifts and in arccontinent collisional zones. Dr. Jack Pashin My first year at OSU proved quite rewarding, and it has been wonderful working with students, faculty, and alumni. A lot of effort has been going into the development of an Unconventional Hydrocarbon Center at OSU that is a cooperative effort among the Boone Pickens School of Geology, the College of Engineering, Architecture, and Technology, and researchers in a variety of departments around campus. The official launch of the center is scheduled for sometime this spring. With the support of Conoco-Phillips, we have purchased a high-resolution computed X-ray tomography unit that was installed on campus in December. This facility gives us leading-edge capabilities to image rock fabric nondestructively in three dimensions. My laboratory is slowly coming together, and I just received a microscope with full thin-section and organic petrology capability. The scope will be outfitted with an advanced microphotospectrometer to analyze vitrinite reflectance and fluorescence spectra in organic-rich rocks. Other instruments include a spectral gamma ray probe, a hand-held minipermeameter, an Isotube gas sampling system, and 27 seats of PetroMod software that were donated to the School by Schlumberger. We will be sharing a new lab with the Petroleum Engineering program that will be dedicated to tight rock characterization and includes an array of porosimeters and permeameters.
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