18 include chemical characterization of the produced water from the Black Warrior Basin coalbed methane play, and paleoredox conditions during the Cretaceous-‐Paleogene mass extinction. Before I left on sabbatical, I taught a slightly revamped GEOL 1114 course in the Spring, as well as the graduate class in Marine Geochemical Cycles. A new addition to my teaching load next fall will be an online Introduction to Oceanography class, which I am currently preparing. I’m aiming for a course that is both fun and informative, and I have some pretty interesting class projects planned. Unfortunately, I will miss seeing everyone at the Alumni Banquet this year, but I will be back to my normal OSU schedule in the Fall, with lots of stories to tell. Dr. Natascha Riedinger Assistant Professor; Marine Systems; Sedimentary Geochemistry; Biogeo- ‐ chemical Cycles Greetings! Another productive and exciting year has passed. During the spring semester I spent the majority of my time writing papers and research proposals, and of course teaching. Additionally to my Marine Geology class, I also ‘hosted’ the undergraduate reading and writing club again. During that semester the students had to work on a project: get samples, analyze them, and present the results in front of some peer and faculty from the Boone Pickens School of Geology. For this purpose we went to the famous ‘Halihan Lake’. With a lot of help from Dr. Halihan the students were able to collect several water samples (lake inflow, outflow, groundwater, etc.). All samples were analyzed for trace metal contents by the students. One of the undergraduate students, Chris Jones, who participated in this club also stayed on as an undergraduate researcher in my lab. The graduate students in my lab are also very productive: Michelle Abshire (former Lutiker) presented results of her work on uranium and organic matter correlation at the Goldschmidt conference in Paris, France in August. In January my second PhD student, Steve Saboda, started; and during summer my second Master student, Justin Steinmann, graduated. He completed his thesis regarding chemostratigraphic tools applied on Mississippian Limestone deposits. The results were presented at the AAPG meeting (Houston) and also at the Goldschmidt conference. I am also very excited to report that I was able to add another major instrument to my lab – a carbon and sulfur analyzer (ELTRA 2000). We can now analyze quite rapid total carbon and inorganic carbon (and thus calculate the amount of organic carbon) in the sediment and rock samples. After visiting the field camp in Colorado again for a week, I spent the rest of the summer in Germany - ‐ I was awarded a research fellowship at the Hanse- ‐ Wissenschaftskolleg (HWK) in Delmen- ‐ horst, an Institute for Advanced Studies. There, I used the time to focus on writing manuscripts and proposals, and I also networked with many German and international scientists. For example, working with a scientist from Oregon State University, Dr. Marta Torres, who was also a HWK fellow resulted in the submission of an abstract to the American Geophysical Union (AGU). The AGU meeting took place in New Orleans in December where I presented a crossover- ‐dataset of geochemical and geophysical data, using paleomagnetic data to identify deep- ‐ subsurface massive (authigenic) carbonate layers in active continental margin sediments. I am also still a member of the he U.S. Advisory Committee for Scientific Ocean Drilling (USAC) – which is a national committee that advises on scientific ocean drilling. We have two meetings per year summer and winter and our last winter meeting took place at the University of Texas at Austin, where we had the chance to see the new pressure- ‐core sampling facility to sample gas-‐rich (gas tight) cores. I am keeping this article slightly shorter, because I am currently at sea in the South Atlantic on the German research vessel RV SONNE. We are studying biogeochemical changes in marine sediments related to sedimentary events. For example, we took samples from coarse grained, well sorted contourites, that is, current- ‐driven deposits, to see how the deposition of sediments with high porosity affects the geochemical signals within these sediments. And we explored the geochemical signals of massive, rapidly deposited drift bodies. Dr. Javier Vilcaez Assistant Professor; Computational Model-‐ ing; Earth Resources; Environment It is my hope that this letter finds you well. I would like to first share with you the research accomplishments of my research group. Last year we published two peer-‐ reviewed papers. One with Babak Shabani (PhD student) as first author. Pouyan Ebrahimi and Babak Shabani (PhD students) made oral presentations about their researches on the environmental impacts of hydraulic fracturing wastewater disposal and enhanced hydrocarbon recovery at the Geological Society of America (GSA 2016) national meeting held in Denver. I made two presentations about the research done by Joshua York, and Tristan Seabeck (MS students) on geological carbon dioxide storage, one at the American Chemical Society (251th ACS) national meeting held in San Diego, and another at the American Geophysical Union (AGU 2016) national meeting held in Baltimore. Overall I am happy with the progress made by my research group, two more papers are under
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