Mr. Walter M. Cox ’57
Mrs. Ruth G. Deike ’56
Mr. David M. Demshur ’77
Dr. Lawrence J. Drew ’64
Dr. Francis O. Dudas ’90
Mr. William R. England ’59
Dr. William M. Flock ’60
Mr. Robert G. Graf ’56
Mr. John R. Ketcha ’69
Mr. Bruce H. Neilson ’74
Dr. Allison R. Palmer ’46
Dr. George R. Rapp, Jr. ’60
Dr. Allan F. Schneider ’51
Mr. Thomas S. Semple ’70
Dr. Charles J. Spengler ’65
Mr. David J. Stuart ’48
Dr. David A. Vacco ’09
Mr. Terence M. Wolf ’81
Mr. Richard K. Yoder ’69
Classmates Bob Lanning, Lenny Wildrick and Karen Wenrich got together for a visit in April 2020 just as COVID-19 was ramping up and planed a geology reunion, assuming the pandemic would be over by the fall of 2020. Locating fellow geology classmates seemed like it should have been easy, but it wasn’t. For help, the group contacted Roger Cuffey and Duff Gold, who were always dear to all of us, and who have kept in contact with many of us over the years.
Robert J. Bodnar ’85
Bodnar, who is the C. C. Garvin Professor of Geochemistry and University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Geosciences at Virginia Tech, was elected to the U. S. National Academy of Sciences.
Beth Stump boarded a helicopter in Louisiana that buzzed across the Gulf of Mexico and landed on an oil drilling platform in the middle of the sea—there was no turning back, she was now a geoscientist.
Laura Guertin, distinguished professor of Earth sciences at Penn State Bradywine, gave the department’s 2023 Lattman Visiting Scholar of Science and Society Lecture in November.
Scientists use a range of communication tools to connect with audiences. Guertin’s talk, “A creative approach to science storytelling with quilts,” discussed using a more creative approach, such as quilts, to tell stories of science.
Chris Widga didn’t set out to be a museum director. It’s a role that found him carefully and slowly, much like an archaeologist excavates through millennia an inch at a time.
A young Widga liked science, but he wasn’t obsessed with digs and dinosaur bones. He didn’t think much about archaeology, geosciences, and paleontology, or even museums such as the EMS Museum & Art Gallery. Instead, he saw his future freestyling as a jazz musician, a performer behind the trombone.
The newly renovated lab was made possible by a generous gift from Randall T. Cygan (M.S. ‘80 and Ph.D. ‘83 in geochemistry and mineralogy) and Donna Cygan.
Faculty and staff who will be using the lab: (front row (L to R) Laura Liermann, Kim Lau and Isabel Fendley; back row (L to R) Matt Fantle and Steve Swavely.
Penn State hosted the International Geobiology Course (IGC) this summer, which ran from July 16 to July 21.
Now in its twentieth year, IGC is an immersive, multidisciplinary summer course that explores the co-evolution of the Earth and it’s biosphere, with an emphasis on how microbial processes affect the environment and leave imprints in the rock record.
If you train your eyes on the vast outcrop of the Rocky Mountains, you can see the remnants of our planet’s history. It’s a span that dwarfs nearly anything Earthly, including the twenty-five years Don Fisher has been surveying these rocks with students during an annual rite of passage for all geosciences majors in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences: Field Camp.
But outside of geological time, it’s quite a feat for the professor of geosciences.