Geotimes August 1997 - About People

ABOUT PEOPLE

August 1997

The American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) has announced its 1997-1998 Executive Committee. EDWARD K. DAVID, an independent geologist from Roswell, N.M., began his term as president on July 1. RICHARD S. BISHOP, Exxon Exploration, has been chosen as president-elect. Other newly elected committee members are ROY D. NURMI, Schlumberger Wireline, vice president; ELIZABETH B. CAMPEN, consulting geologist, Billings, Mont., secretary; and NEIL F. HURLEY, Colorado School of Mines, editor. STEVEN VEAL, DCX Resources, serves as treasurer, and DAN L. SMITH, Texas Meridian Resources, chairs the AAPG House of Delegates.

The American Geophysical Union (AGU) has selected 35 scientists to be AGU Fellows in 1997. The society has honored the following men and women: LEONARD F. BURLAGA, ALFRED G. DUBA, JEAN FILLOUX, YOSHIO FUKAO, GARY A. GLATZMAIER, SUSAN L. HALGEDAHL,DAVID HALPERN, JAMES W. HEAD III, RUSSELL J. HEMLEY, JOHN R. HOLLOWAY, ALAN D. HOWARD, MIRIAM KASTNER, KLAUS KEIL, GEOFFREY KING, E. PHILLIP KRIDER, MARK D. KURZ, DAVID E. LOPER, JANET G. LUHMANN, IAN MCDOUGALL, PETER OLSON, MICHAEL J. PRATHER, EUGENE M. RASMUSSON, A.R. RAVISHANKARA, PATRICIA H. REIFF, ALLAN R. ROBINSON, DAVID T. SANDWELL, FRIEDRICH SCHOTT, ROBERT W. SCHUNK, URI SHAMIR, W. JAMES SHUTTLEWORTH, WILLIAM L. SJOGREN, ROGER E. SMITH, JOHN A. WHITEHEAD, PETER J. WIERENGA, and TATIANA YANOVSKAYA. AGU Fellows are selected based on their "attainment of acknowledged eminence in a branch of geophysics."

PETER COOK will step down as director of the British Geological Survey in September. Cook, who lead the organization for seven years, successfully staved off efforts to privatize it.

The National Association of Geoscience Teachers has announced the 1996 Outstanding Earth Science Teacher Section and State award winners. Section award recipients are: VIRGINIA WINSLOW, New England Section; LINDSAY KILLEN, Eastern Section; ROBERT CORBIN, Southeastern Section; MONICA D. DAVIS, Midcontinent Section; PHIL SCHWEITZER, Central Section; RANDY L. KILLIAN-SMITH, Texas Section; and RUDY DE MORDAIGLE, Far Western Section. State winners are: MARK POGGENSEE, Wisconsin; KAREN WIGNALL, Iowa; PAIGE SCHULTE, Louisiana; POLLI VAUGHN, South Carolina; ELVA STOUT, Georgia; and PAM TAYLOR HENSON, Alabama.

Hydrogeologist BRUCE L. CUTRIGHT has joined PTI Environmental Services as a principal of the company's new Milwaukee, Wis., office. A former director of the Geological Society of America's Institute for Environmental Education, Cutright is a fellow of the Geological Society of America, American Association of Petroleum Geologists, American Geophysical Union, and American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The Clinton administration has tapped KATHY KARPAN, a lawyer and former Wyoming secretary of state, to serve as director of the Interior Department's Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement.

FRED AMINZADEH, Unocal E&P Technology, has been awarded the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences' highest scientific award, the Kapitsa Gold Medal. A member of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, Aminzadeh was honored for international advances in geophysics.

ROBERT C. LIEBERMANN is the chair of the new Department of Geosciences at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

ROBERT LAMONICA has been named executive vice president and chief operating officer of Leggette, Brashears & Graham, Inc., a national environmental engineering services firm. Since joining the company in 1976, Lamonica has served as an associate, vice president, and director. He is certified as a professional geologist by the American Institute of Professional Geologists and is a member of the Geological Society of America.

MERVIN KONTROVITZ, who headed the Department of Geosciences at Northeast Louisiana University, has been appointed dean of the College of Pure and Applied Sciences at that institution.

The Colorado School of Mines promoted WENDY HARRISON and RICHARD WENDLANDT to professor of geology and geological engineering. GREGORY S. HOLDEN, associate professor of geology and geological engineering, won the school's 1996-97 Alumni Award for superior teaching at the undergraduate level.

Corning Inc. presented its Stookey Award to S. JOHN LOUISNATHAN for his development of a new technique for determining the core geometry in optical fibers with unprecedented precision.

American Association of Petroleum Geologists member WILLIAM R. ALMON has been named a Texaco Fellow. He is a senior research consultant at Texaco E&P Technology in Houston.

JEAN D. JUILLAND, who retired last spring as a senior geologist with the Bureau of Land Management, now works as an independent consultant. He is a member of the Society for Mining, Metallurgy, and Exploration.

HARRY SPANNAUS, vice president of corporate services of Parker and Parsley Petroleum Company, received the first "Voice Award" presented by the Independent Petroleum Association of America. Spannaus was honored for efforts to educate the public about the oil and natural gas industry. J. LARRY NICHOLS, president and chief executive officer of Devon Energy Corp., received the organization's 1997 Leadership Award.

Obituaries

WAYNE A. PRYOR, professor of geology at the University of Cincinnati, taught sedimentology and petroleum geology at that institution for 32 years. Pryor, who guided more than 70 graduate students through their Ph.D. and M.S. research, received the geology department's 1996-1997 Teaching Excellence Award. Known for his effective use of field trips, he continued teaching until shortly before his death, which followed a long struggle with cancer.
Pryor's research covered a range of topics in sedimentology and included important work on all three major rock classes. In the area of carbonates, he and his students developed models invoking storm activity as the controlling factor for the deposition of the Cincinnatian limestones. He also worked extensively on carboniferous sediments of the Illinois Basin.
In coarse clastics studies, Pryor was long an advocate of using quantitative measurements on modern sands as a guide to understanding ancient sandstone reservoirs. Pryor worked on point-bar deposits of the Rio Grande, Wabash, and Mississippi rivers; he and his students published many in-situ measurements of permeability in these sands and related their observations to bedform. In the last three years, he extended this approach to understanding reservoir heterogeneity to a study of Wisconsinan glacio-fluvial deposits of southwest Ohio and adjacent portions of Indiana.
In the field of fine-grained clastics, Pryor was known as a proponent of the role of organisms in sediment deposition. He published papers on Ophiomorpha as a sedimentologic agent, co-wrote the book Sedimentology of Shale, and presented this topic to the geoscience community as an American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) distinguished lecturer in 1982.
A long-time member and former officer of both AAPG and SEPM (Society for Sedimentary Geology), as well as a founding member of the Division of Environmental Geology at AAPG, Pryor was appointed Fulbright professor and fellow at the University of Heidelberg and served as Crosby Visiting Professor of Economic Geology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Pryor earned his doctoral degree at Rutgers in 1959. He worked as an exploration geologist and sedimentologist for Gulf Oil Corp. until 1965, when he joined the geology department at Cincinnati. May 12, 1997.

NED A. OSTENSO, geophysicist and former chief scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), was a respected federal research administrator. Ostenso retired last year from NOAA's Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, where he served as assistant administrator. He also worked at the Office of Naval Research and was an assistant presidential science adviser. Ostenso is known for his contributions to determining the mass of the Antarctic ice sheet, and has a mountain there named for him.
In 1996, the American Geophysical Union recognized Ostenso for his years of service to geophysics by awarding him the Waldo E. Smith Medal. He chaired the union's ad hoc Real Estate Committee, Russian Translations Board, and Public Affairs Committee, and was a long-time member of the Budget and Finance Committee. April 13, 1997.

Academy Honors Geoscientists

Geoscientists Tapped for Academy Honors
The National Academy of Sciences has elected a slate of new members, including geoscientists TANYA ATWATER and E. BRUCE WATSON. Election to membership in the academy is one of the highest honors that can be accorded a U.S. scientist.
Tanya Atwater, a professor in the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is an authority on plate tectonics. She earned her Ph.D. from the Scripps School of Oceanography in 1972 and worked as an assistant and associate professor of marine geophysics with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution joint program before joining the faculty at Santa Barbara in 1980.
Atwater's research focuses on sea-floor spreading, the history of plate interactions in the North Pacific, and the Cenozoic tectonic history of the southwestern United States. She has studied active sea-floor spreading discontinuities and is recognized as a leader in identifying and interpreting the significance of these features. Her work mapping the growth of the Pacific plate helped to establish the subduction history of the North American plates.
Atwater is particularly interested in the continental geologic record. She is using her studies of Neogene tectonic events in Southern California to develop a new understanding of the imprint of plate interactions.
She is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the Geological Society of America and a member of the Association for Women Geoscientists, National Association of Geoscience Teachers, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
E. Bruce Watson is the Institute Professor of Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. He received his Ph.D. in geochemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976, following a pre-doctoral fellowship at the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Geophysical Laboratory. An experimental geochemist, Watson joined the faculty at Rensselaer in 1977. He served as chairman of the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences from 1990 to 1995.
Watson's interests include the processes affecting the distribution of the chemical elements in the crust and upper mantle. He has pursued research topics ranging from mineral/melt partitioning to diffusion (in melts, crystals, and fluids) to textural aspects of partially molten and fluid-bearing rocks. Watson's research contributions include work on accessory minerals as hosts for geochemically interesting trace elements. He has also conducted studies on solubilities and dissolution rates, lattice diffusion of radiogenic isotopes, and inclusion/host relationships.
Watson is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union, the Geological Society of America, and the Mineralogical Society of America. He is currently the vice president and president-elect of the Mineralogical Society. A member of the Geochemical Society, he received that organization's F.W. Clarke Award in 1983.