10 NEWS FROM THE FACULTY Dr. Mohamed Abdelsalam Professor; Boone Pickens Chair; Graduate Coordinator Hello everyone. I am starting my fourth year in the Boone Pickens School of Geology. I joined the School as the Boone Pickens Chair of Applied Geophysics and Professor of Geology in the fall of 2012 coming from the Department of Geological Sciences and Engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology. My family and I have settled down nicely in Stillwater and we are enjoying being part of the School’s family. My son Montasir is finishing his BS degree this year in the Boone Pickens School of Geology. It is a great feeling. Last year I taught Structural Geology with 47 students. I must admit that I have enjoyed teaching the class and I am delighted to see such high quality of undergraduate students in our School. Currently I am teaching the graduate course Spectral Signal Processing and Applications in Geology. As the graduate advisor of the School, I am delighted to see tremendous increase in the interest in our graduate program. We received over 150 applications for admision in the spring and fall semesters of 2015. This year we have received 100 applications for the fall semester 2016 admission. Many of these applications are of high-quality and applicants come from schools in all parts of the US as well as other countries. Currently, our graduate students are from half of the states in the US in addition to 20 other countries. We had 46 theses defense since I became the graduate advisor in July 2013. The current enrollment in our graduate program stands at 24 PhD students and 64 MS students. The Tectonics Research Group which is a research collaboration between myself and my colleagues Drs. Estella Atekwana and Daniel Dao Davila is growing stronger with the involvement of 6 PhD students, 11 MS students and 6 undergraduate students. We have funding to keep us going this year, but we have been very active in trying to secure future funding. So far we have a number of proposals submitted to the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study different tectonic processes, especially continental rifting in the East African Rift System. My Geodynamic and Geospatial Science Lab is now complete. It is great to see it now populated with active graduate and undergraduate students. We have been working on enabling the lab for new technologies including SeroVision (for three-dimensional capture of geological outcrops using terrestrial photogrammetry) and Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) (for mm scale surface change including crustal deformation using Satellite RADAR data). We have acquired 10 broadband seismic stations and these are now deployed around Stillwater, OK for active faults mapping as part of the PhD research of Tim Sickbert. Please come over and visit. I would love to hear from you regarding research ideas and how my lab and expertise can be of use to you. Undergraduate students, from close to far, Steve Zotto, Amy Pritt, Jordan Morgan and Stuart Turnipseed conducting digital image processing research in the Geospatial Sciences and Geodynamics Lab.
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