8 NEWS FROM THE FACULTY Dr. Mohamed Abdelsalam Professor; Boone Pickens Chair; Graduate Coordinator Hello everyone. I am starting my fifth year in the Boone Pickens School of Geology at Oklahoma State University and I am looking forward to many years to come. 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. I am proud to see that my son Montasir has finished his BS degree in the Boone Pickens School of Geology. It is a great feeling. I taught the graduate course Spectral Signal Processing and Application in the spring of last year with 6 graduate students and Geomorphology in the fall of last year as well with 36 undergraduate students. Currently, I am teaching Igneous and Metamorphic Petrology with 51 students. This was my first time teaching Geomorphology and Igneous and metamorphic Petrology. It is a wonderful experience for me. As the graduate advisor of the School of Geology I am delighted to see the steady interest in our graduate program. We have received over 100 applications for the spring and fall semesters of 2016. This year we have received 85 applications for the fall semester 2017 admission. Many of these applications are of high‐quality and they come from schools in all parts of the US as well as other countries. Currently, our enrolled graduate students are from half of the states in the US in addition to 20 other countries. We had 63 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 at the School of Geology, which is a research collaboration between my colleagues Drs. Estella Atekwana and Daniel Dao Davila and me, is growing stronger with the involvement of 5 PhD students, 10 MS students and 5 undergraduate students. We have a proposals submitted to National Science Foundation (NSF) to study the Western Branch of the East African Rift System. It is great to see my Geodynamic and Geospatial Science Lab 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). Currently, we have 10 broadband seismic stations deployed around Stillwater, OK for active faults mapping as part of the research of PhD student 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. Dr. Eliot Atekwana Professor; Stable Isotope Geochemistry; Hydrogeology Greetings to all alumni and friends! I report to you a successful 2016 in teaching and research. At OSU, I taught GEOL 5433‐ Isotope Geochemistry. I taught Geology and Human Affairs ‐ GEOL 1014, Special Problems in Earth Science ‐ GEOL 4990, Master's Thesis‐ GEOL 5000, Research Methods and Techniques in Geosciences‐ GEOL 5243, Advanced Studies in Geology ‐ GEOL 5990. My collaborators, students and I made four presentations at scientific meetings and published papers in the Journal of Hydrology: Regional Studies, Hydrological Processes, and Science of The Total Environment. I continue to work with our students and collaborators to wrap up projects funded by Newfield Exploration Company, Chevron Energy Technology Company and the National Science Foundation. My MS student, Nicole Paizis successfully defended her thesis and is now gainfully employed with USGS. I continue to work MS students, Krystal Heibel, Charles Missi, and Chris Laviolette and two undergraduate students. I served on 2 MS thesis and 2 PhD dissertation committees during the year.
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