3 Greetings from the Department Head Estella Atekwana 2016 continued to be a difficult year for us due to the low oil prices. However, things appear to be looking brighter this year with the price of oil trading at ~$53/barrel, up ~30 % from this time last year. Nonetheless, we continue to move forward and we had another record year. We added one new faculty in seismic exploration, Dr. Ahmed Ismail who joined us from Schlumberger (please see article in this issue). Dr. Ismail has broad research interests in applied geophysics ranging from environmental and engineering geophysics to archaeological geophysics, and most importantly to exploration geophysics. Our students, faculty and alums continue to win honors on campus and at national meetings and publish groundbreaking research. This year, our students and faculty presented 100 papers at regional, national, and international meetings, with our students winning best poster awards. We published 43 peer‐reviewed papers in prestigious international journals and we saw record numbers of undergraduate students engaged in research. Of course the drop in oil prices is also affecting us and we are experiencing a drop in our grant production numbers. Nevertheless, our faculty continue to submit grants and although funding is down we had a record $3.7M in grant expenditure from faculty research activities. We continue to see declines in our undergraduate student enrollments which now stands at 101 down from 150 students in 2015. In 2016 we saw the smallest freshman class in almost a decade (9 students) but we are optimistic based on our fall 2017 applications and we have embarked on an aggressive recruitment effort. On the other hand, our graduate enrollments remain strong at 93 (23 PhDs and 70 MS) and we remain the second largest graduate program in the College of Arts and Sciences and the largest graduate program in STEM in the College. Graduate applications remain strong and we continue to receive applications from top tier geoscience programs nationwide and internationally (including Princeton!!). We again ran our Freshman Field trip this year with funding provided by Concho Resources Inc. Dr. Puckette led the two‐day trip to Southern Oklahoma Aulacogen and the students were introduced to the geology of the Wichita Mountains and the rifting and filling of the Southern Oklahoma Aulacogen. This year we graduated 38 BS, 16 MS students, and for the first time since the inception of our PhD program we graduated 4 PhD students. We spent $332,764 on undergraduate student scholarships and graduate student fellowships. Because of your generosity, students are able to have access to a world‐class education in the Boone Pickens School of Geology (Thank you!!). Our Mississippian Consortium is winding down and an AAPG Memoir detailing the results of the different projects completed under the consortium is in preparation and will be coming out soon. Watch out for this very special volume to see the excellent work that our students and faculty engaged in the consortium have done. Six companies recruited in the School this year, and for the first time in almost 8 years ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips came back to recruit. A major goal of the School was to bring back the majors. We are delighted that this finally happened. It took a lot of hard work from the faculty and students to turn our program around. Several students had offers and some had multiple offers. Our students are also seeing opportunities in the environmental industry and the USGS. Our hydrogeology course this fall saw its largest enrollment in a decade with ~44 students. Environmental geology this spring also saw an uptick in enrollment with 42 students in the class (even though the class meets at 7:30 am in the morning). Last year I indicated that we had gone online with some of our courses. I am happy to report that we taught four online courses in 2016 (Geology and Human Affairs; Earthquakes; Volcanoes and Disasters; Historical Geology; and National Parks). Geology and Human Affairs and National Parks are both in high demand and we now teach them every semester with total enrollments exceeding 200 students each semester. We are currently developing two more courses (Oceanography and Environmental Geology) to put online. Finally, the faculty and the advisory board worked on a strategic plan that will chart our course for the next ten years. We are preparing an abbreviated version to be put on the School’s webpage. We also had an external review in October. We are waiting for the final report which will tell us how well we are doing and where opportunities for growth exist. Be sure to stop by the department so we can show you around. We love to hear from you, so keep in touch.
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