15 BOONE PICKENS SCHOOL OF GEOLOGY with our WRANE group from Owasso High School, a visit to El Malpais National Monument for the annular solar eclipse and a chance to hike and visit various basaltic eruption features including tubes, bubbles, permanent ice, and cinder and spatter cones. It was also nice in the post-pandemic world to participate in in-person meetings of GSA, the Tulsa Geological Society, Ft. Smith Geological Society, and the Ardmore Geological Society. This spring has been busy with a core workshop for the OGWA, teaching GEOL 1014 and GEOL 3034, school and CAS committee work, mentoring undergraduate and graduate student researchers, and planning summer activities. I hope to see you at the 75 Anniversary field camp reunion in June. Dr. Tracy Quan 2023 was certainly a busy year! Obviously the main news for me was being promoted to Full Professor this past summer. Many thanks to all my students, collaborators, and BPSoG faculty and alumni who have helped me get here with their hard work and support—I really appreciate it. On the geochemistry front, my lab is continuing to investigate Cretaceous climatic events using the IODP Expedition 369 deep sea sediment cores from the Southern Ocean near Australia. Master’s student Mengran Xin is working on analyzing samples from Ocean Anoxic Event 2, characterizing redox changes at this location. A new PhD student, Kehinde Egunjobi is expanding our investigations to the Eocene, looking at the climatic changes during the Middle Eocene Climatic Optimum (MECO) and the geochemical signatures of that event in the Southern Ocean. I also had the opportunity to do a series of lectures in the United Kingdom to talk about my research into using nitrogen isotopes as redox proxies. It was great to talk science with friends and collaborators, and nice to meet new people and explore new places. The NSF-funded Water Research, Assessment, and Networking Ecosystem (WRANE) program is continuing to introduce pre-university students and teachers to water-related geoscience topics via virtual lectures, career networking, and community science research projects. We are pleased that several of last year’s WRANE teachers have chosen to stay in the program and expand their current student groups, and we have added one new WRANE group. We are always interested in recruiting new teachers and students into the program, and any high school science teacher interested in geoscience can contact me about joining. More about the WRANE program and the Battelle-sponsored GEO-REx summer field camp can be found in a separate article in this newsletter. For me, 2024 has started with a bang, including developing a brand new course on the Chemistry of Earth Systems for the new Environmental Geoscience major. I enjoy the opportunity to teach students about geochemistry and develop hands-on lab and field activities, but it is always a challenge the first time around. I’ll have to report on how it went in next year’s newsletter. Dr. Brandon Spencer The 2023-24 year has been very busy for me in teaching. I continued teaching the new majors introductory class focused on field trips, and this year eight faculty from OSU and an OGS mapper came with us to the field and lent their individual expertise. The course is becoming a great way to get undergraduates involved in the School immediately—many of them pursue research with faculty. We added a trip to Black Mesa this year, which was hugely popular! I taught Mineralogy/Petrology in Fall 2023, Volcanology in spring 2023, and am currently teaching Economic Geology in spring 2024, in addition to my introductory courses. Last year’s field camp
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