EAS graduate and undergraduate have received awards, fellowships, scholarships, and serve as leaders in professional organizations. Here’s a list of the 2021 activity and honors.
EAS Students awarded grants in the NASA FINESST (Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology) competition. FINESST is an annual NASA funding opportunity where graduate students act as “future investigators” and are functionally PIs on their own research proposals (draft the proposals, work with ORA to submit them, etc.). The applications are fairly intensive and time consuming (the solicitation document alone is 33 pages). It’s technically a grant, not a fellowship, and so provides great experience for early career scientists. A successful applicant can request and receive up to $135,000 USD over three years in a research grant.
For this year’s competition, NASA received 835 proposals, of which 130 were successful. More specifically to the NASA “Earth Science” Division, 351 proposals were received, and only 58 proposals were selected. Of those 58 proposals, two were from Earth and Atmospheric Sciences students, and one was from SPEA here at IU.
Harrison Martin received a NASA FINESST fellowship. It will support his stipend, tuition fees, travel, and publication fees for his project working with Dr. Doug Edmonds on “Testing the Hypothesis that River Discharge Variability Controls Megafan Formation in Foreland Basins.”
Sam Smith received a NASA FINESST fellowship on “Determining the Dynamical Drivers of Present and Future Changes in the Atmospheric Water Cycle.” Working with his advisor, Dr. Paul Staten, Sam will utilize satellite data to evaluate the latest generation of climate models (used for the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report). Specifically, they will examine how well these models simulate the movement of moisture by continental-scale weather systems and the extreme rainfall that often results.
Jeff Valenza has been awarded an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship. These postdocs allow the recipient to carry out their own work with a mentor of their choice, and can be split between US and international labs. Jeff will do exactly that to continue his work on fluvial processes including river avulsion events. He will work with Vamsi Ganti at UC Santa Barbara and Alex Whittaker at Imperial College.
EAS Graduate Student Elizabeth Sherrill’s article featured in EOS
There’s an exciting new EOS research spotlight article covering Elizabeth Sherrill’s research on predicting the risk of earthquake activity.
It is based on Elizabeth’s paper with Kaj Johnson from December in JGR Solid Earth titled “New insights into the slip budget at Nankai: an iterative approach to estimate coseismic slip and afterslip.” They fit an inverse model to geodetic data of movements along a subduction zone beneath Japan associated with big earthquakes in 1944 and 1946, and then used it to produce a forward model that predicts the likelihood of future movements along fault lines (earthquakes) based on how much movement there has been in recent years. The same approach can be applied to tectonically active areas around the world to improve risk assessment and policy. Congratulations Elizabeth!
Clarke DeLisle, PhD student working in Brian Yanites’ geomorphology group, received an Outstanding Student Presentation Award from the American Geophysical Union.
The award was for Clarke’s virtual presentation at the December AGU conference titled Cascading Flood Hazard Following the 2009 Typhoon Morakot, Southern Taiwan. He found that large storms like the 2009 typhoon increase the probability of flooding for decades or longer after the storm, largely because of greater frequency of landslides that cause sediment aggradation.
Senior undergraduate student Natalie Mattner received the Rudman-Pavlis Research Fellowship in Geophysics in 2021. The fellowship is awarded annually to an undergraduate student with a strong interest in geophysics and comes with a financial award as well as hourly funds to support a research project guided by the geophysics faculty in EAS. Natalie has sent the last year working with Dr. Kaj Johnson on a project to extract tectonic signals from GPS time series data from southwest Japan. This work involves identifying transient deformation associate with earthquakes in the region, including transient motions following the huge magnitude-9 2011 Tohoku earthquake. Natalie plans to complete this research as a senior thesis and earn the Honors BS in Earth Science degree in May 2022.
EAS Undergraduate Students Elected to Phi Beta Kappa
Please join me in congratulating our students Sydni Rockwell and Dylan Seal on their election to Phi Beta Kappa.
Phi Beta Kappa is the oldest academic honor society in the US, and is often described as its most prestigious one. Membership is by invitation only and is based on combination of grade point average, breadth and depth of study, and track record of achievement from high school to the present. It is quite an honor for Sydni and Dylan to be selected, and also for the department to have two new student members.
The College of Arts