9 NEWS FROM THE FACULTY Dr. Mohamed Abdelsalam Professor; Boone Pickens Chair; Graduate Coordinator Hello everyone. I am starting my 6th 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. In the Spring 2017 semester, I taught the course Igneous and Metamorphic Petrology with 53 students, and in the Fall 2017 semester I taught the graduate course Spectral Signal Processing and Application with 5 graduate students and Geo- ‐ morphology with 25 undergraduate students. As the graduate advisor of the School of Geology, I am delighted to see the continuous interest in our graduate program. We have received over 65 applications for the spring and fall semesters of 2018 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 75 theses defense since I became the graduate advisor in July 2013. The current enrollment in our graduate program stands at 24 PhD students and 51 MS students. The Tectonics Research Group at the School of Geology which is a research collaboration between my colleague Dr. Daniel Laó Dávila and myself is growing stronger with the involvement of 5 PhD students, 10 MS students and 5 undergraduate students. We have (in collaboration with Dr. Ahmed Ismail) a proposals submitted to National Science Foundation (NSF) to secure funding to continue involving Boone Pickens School of Geology students studying 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 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 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. Michael Grammer Professor; Chesapeake Energy Chair of Petroleum Geology; Carbonate Sediment-‐ ology and Stratigraphy, Petroleum Geology Dear Alumni and Friends, greetings from Stillwater. This year has been an exciting year with the plans for the Gary F. Stewart Core Research Facility coming to fruition. At this moment, we have seen initial floor plans and construction details and hope to finalize everything within the coming weeks, followed quickly by the initiation of the construction phase. This will be an incredibly valuable facility for us here in the BPSG – for teaching at the undergraduate and graduate levels, research, and outreach initiatives. I am sorry to have missed the Celebration in November (I was in Europe teaching a short course that had been scheduled early last year), but everything I heard indicates is was a very successful and enjoyable time. Thanks again to everyone who has helped make this initiative a reality. In addition to the Core Facility plans and working with my students, I have spent quite a bit of time (over the last 2 years) as the lead editor on two special publications: GSA Special Paper 531 on Paleozoic Resources of the Michigan Basin, and AAPG Memoir 116 on Mississippian Reservoirs of the Mid-‐Continent of the U.S.. Dealing with both organizations, scores of authors, 2-‐3 reviewers for each paper, plus the papers from our group has been an enormous task. That said, as I write this, the GSA volume will be printed next month and we are hoping the AAPG Memoir will be printed this summer. It will be a welcome finish to what I think will be two very important special volumes, especially the AAPG Memoir with the spotlight on the BPSG (both with fellow editors Jay Gregg, Jim Puckette and Priyank Jaiswal) as well as the numerous OSU students who are lead authors and co-‐authors on more than half the papers in the volume. This last year, our group was able to go to two world class outcrop locations to study carbonate depositional systems and sequence stratigraphy. In the Spring, we went to the Paradox Basin in SW Utah for several days of Pennsylvanian carbonates, phylloid algal buildups and high resolution sequence stratigraphy from a reservoir characterization standpoint. We were joined on our trip by group alums Miranda Childress and Buddy Price, both of whom have been very supportive of the group over the last few years. Buddy and Miranda’s industry experience was very helpful in discussions with the current group of students on the potential applications of what we were examining. In the Fall, we joined Jay Gregg and his group
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