Greetings from Athens – this has been a busy year with a completely new room 200A, a transition in the department head from Sue Goldstein to Mike Roden, rapid growth of our undergraduate program and an increasingly international flavor to our program. However, the most important event was the very sad passing of Vernon Hurst this past summer. Vernon was active until the day he died and continued to work on a geochemical text based on his life’s work. As most of you know Vernon was a native of Georgia and a veteran of World War II. He founded the Department of Geology in 1965 and he was a daily presence in our operations for the next 46 years. He supervised numerous graduate students, was a University Research Professor for many years, and published numerous papers. He was truly a giant in southeastern geology. One of his students, Bill Barker, has written a more complete obituary published in the December 2006 issue of Elements.
For the last few years, our undergraduate enrollment has increased and I’m pleased to report that our latest tally shows 37 undergraduate majors. These students are the lifeblood of the department, and so we are very pleased with the increased enrollment. Now we are faced with a new experience: wondering how we can set up all the core course labs. Our graduate student population remains stable at about 35 students, well below the 70 students we had during the late 1980’s but given the current national and state funding situation, 35 students is our limit. Our departmental budget, as well as all departments in Franklin College, suffered cuts again this year although the bulk of the cut has been restored recently.
A second growing aspect of our department is our increased connections with international students and post-docs. When I first started teaching in 1984, we had a good Brazilian connection orchestrated by Norm Herz and Jim Whitney. That waned over time, and to the detriment of the department. Over the last few years we have developed many new international collaborations with colleagues in Turkey, Russia, Tunisia, Tanzania, Venezuela, Egypt, England and Argentina. These international programs create visibility for the department, and in some cases funding is more accessible than in the extremely competitive US environment.
Given the difficulty of obtaining research grants from national and state sources, we are extremely grateful to our alumni who continue to support our students through donations to the Allard Award, the Berg Scholarship, the Wheeler-Watts scholarship, the Levy award as well as the general account for Geology. The primary use of all these funds is to support graduate and undergraduate research and travel to scientific meetings.
When you are in the Athens area, stop by and we’ll give you a tour of the newly refurbished room 200A. For 50 years, this classroom, with its bad ventilation, hard wooden seats and green chalkboards stood as an example of state-of-the-art teaching technology, circa 1960. This classroom has been completely refurbished in this past year with new seats, a carpet, and up-to-date AV equipment – our faculty and students are delighted with the renovation.
Mike Roden
Professor and Department Head
