January 1999
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January 1999
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During its 1998 annual meeting in Toronto last October, the Geological
Society of America (GSA) elected GAIL ASHLEY as its 1999 president
and the second woman to lead the 110-year-old society. Ashley is a professor
of geological sciences at Rutgers. She directs the Quaternary Studies Certificate
Program, is an associate of the Rutgers Institute of Marine and Coastal
Sciences, and is a Douglass College fellow. She is editor of the Journal
of Sedimentary Research and past president of the Society for Sedimentary
Geology. She also is active in the Association for Women Geoscientists.
CATHLEEN MAY joined GSA in September as director
of its Institute for Environmental Education. Previously, she directed
the national paleontological resources management program for the U.S.
Forest Service. She has worked as a consultant on issues of resource management
and legislation. She has also been a consultant to the entertainment industry
on scientific accuracy and literacy. May earned her Ph.D. in integrative
biology at the University of California-Berkeley.
GSA also welcomed a new director of publications
last fall. PEGGY S. LEHR has 20 years of experience in magazine
and book publishing. Before joining GSA in April, 1998, she was director
of communications for the Association of Operating Room Nurses in Denver.
The society also awarded its Gladys W. Cole Memorial
Research Award for 1998 to STEVEN L. FORMAN, University of Illinois-Chicago.
The $11,000 award will support Forman’s research project, “Holocene Eolian
Activity on the Easter Snake River Plain, Idaho.” GSA gave its W. Storrs
Cole Memorial Research Award, which supports research in invertebrate micropaleontology,
to SUSAN T. GOLDSTEIN, University of Georgia. The $9,000 award will
support her project, “Phylogeny and Reproductive Pattern in the Foraminiferida.”
The 1998–99 officers for the Association of Engineering Geologists are: President JAMES H. MAY, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Waterways Experiment Station in Mississippi; Vice-President/President-Elect ARTHUR H. STUCKEY, Harza Engineering Co. in Chicago, Ill.; Secretary MYLES A. CARTER, INSPEC-SOL INC. in Montreal; Treasurer R. REXFORD UPP, Upp Geotechnology Inc. in San José, Calif.; Past President JOHN H. PECK, Las Vegas, Nev.
The members of the 1998–99 executive committee for the Society of Exploration Geophysicists are: President BRIAN H. RUSSELL, Hampson-Russell Software, Ltd., in Calgary, Alberta, Canada; President-Elect WILLIAM (BILL) N. BARKHOUSE, Mobil Exploration and Producing U.S. in Dallas; First Vice-President JOHN P. CASTAGNA, University of Oklahoma in Norman; Second Vice-President ORLANDO E. CHACIN, PDVSA-INTEVEP in Caracas, Venezuela; Vice-President JOEL S. WATKINS, Texas A&M University in College Station; Secretary-Treasurer ANGIE STRACNER, Mobil Technology Co. in Dallas; and Editor LARRY LINES, University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada.
During its third 1998 meeting, the Mineralogical
Society of America Council selected 1999 award winners and elected
new officers.
IKUO KUSHIRO, director of the Institute for the
Study of the Earth’s Interior at the University of Okayama in Japan, is
the society’s 1999 Roebling Medalist. YINGWEI FEI, a researcher
at the Geophysical Laboratory at the Carnegie Institution of Washington,
won the 1999 MSA Award. ROBERT A. HOWIE of Matlock, England, is
the 1999 recipient of the Distinguished Public Service Award. CHRISTOPHER
L. CAHILL, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Chemistry at the State
University of New York-Stony Brook, won the 1999 crystallography research
grant from the Edward H. Kraus Crystallographic Research Fund. And WIM
VAN WESTRENEN, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Earth Sciences
at the University of Bristol in England, received the 1999 Grant for Student
Research in Mineralogy and Petrology, funded by the MSA Mineralogy/Petrology
Fund.
The society’s 1999 officers are: President JOHN M.
FERRY, Johns Hopkins University; Vice-President WILLIAM CARLSON,
University of Texas-Austin; Treasurer BROOKS HANSON, Science
magazine; Councilor MICHAEL A. CARPENTER, University of Cambridge
in England; and Councilor SORENA S. SORENSEN, Smithsonian Institution
in Washington, D.C.
The Association for Women Geoscientists selected DONNA L. LINDSAY POSTNIKOFF, a graduate student at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, as the first recipient of its Winifred Goldring Award. Goldring became state paleontologist of New York in 1939 and the first female president of the Paleontological Society in 1949.
JOHN C. STEINMETZ became state geologist and director of the Indiana Geological Survey in the fall of 1998, replacing NORMAN C. HESTER, who retired after serving 12 years as director. Steinmetz came to the Indiana Geological Survey after serving as director and state geologist for the Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology and as adjunct professor of geology at the University of Montana-Missoula. From 1982 to 1994, Steinmetz worked as research geologist, senior geologist, and advanced senior geologist for Marathon Oil Co. in Littleton, Colo. Before 1982, he directed the Scanning Electron Microscope Facility at the University of South Florida-St. Petersburg. He earned his Ph.D. in marine geology and geophysics from the Rosenstiel School for Marine and Atmospheric Science at the University of Miami.
HARMON CRAIG, professor of oceanography and geochemistry at Scripps
Institution of Oceanography, received the Balzan Prize last fall from the
Balzan Foundation of Milan, Italy. Established in 1961, the Balzan Prize
recognizes outstanding contributions to the natural sciences, the humanities,
the social sciences, and international affairs. Craig was one of the first
discoverers of hydrothermal vents at the spreading plate on the Galapagos
seafloor. Analyzing gases trapped in Greenland ice cores, he determined
that the atmosphere’s methane content has doubled over the past 300 years.
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