11 BOONE PICKENS SCHOOL OF GEOLOGY Dr. Brandon Spencer Teaching Assistant Professor and Field Camp Co-Director Geoscience Education, Mineralogy/Petrology, and Structural Geology Hi everyone! This year (my second) has been super busy and we’ve seen some transformational changes in the BPSoG. We have a new introductory course for our majors, co-taught by myself and Dr. Jim Knapp in the fall of 2022. The course is almost entirely field-based (11 field trips!) and was well-received by students and other faculty that contributed as visiting lecturers. Our new fleet of GPS-capable iPads made their debut in that course and will continue to be utilized as we introduce them into our Field Camp exercises. In Spring 2022, I taught an elective course called Magmatism and Metamorphism, which served as an advanced petrology course for some of our undergraduates and a group of eight students from OU that opted to make the drive to Stillwater twice a week. A field trip to central Texas (Llano area) was the highlight of that course. I continue to teach Rocks & Minerals (mineralogy/petrology) for our majors, Physical Geology, and Geology and Human Affairs, and have seen some promising young geoscientists come through the doors over the past year. From a research perspective, I’m working with several undergraduates that are pursuing petrology research in central Texas, Oklahoma, and California, and am working with Dr. Jim Knapp to develop a wide-ranging project in the Wichita Mountains which will aim to further understand the structural and tectonic evolution of the Southern Oklahoma Aulacogen “rift” system. I also continue my collaborative research on orogenic collapse in the Scottish Caledonides and Southern Appalachians, which has produced three publications in the last year. I’ve met many of you, but in case we haven’t met, please know that my door is always open and I’d love to chat if you’re around. I’m excited to be here in the BPSoG and couldn’t be more optimistic about the future of our program! Go Pokes! and biotic manganese oxide formation, etc. All the projects have kept me really busy in the last year and coming years! For teaching, I taught Geology and Human Affairs in two semesters. I feel that my teaching skills have been improved! I also taught Evolution of the Earth online using Dr. Ashley Burkett’s materials. This semester, I am teaching Environmental Geochemistry for the first time with an entirely new suite of materials I prepared. Hope the students will learn a lot of geochemistry from my course. Last, I want to express my great thanks to be a member of the BPSoG family and I look forward to working with OSU students and excellent scientists here for the coming years.
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