Gale Blackmer
by Terry Engelder and David Gold, professors emeritus of geosciences
Over the years, the Department of Geosciences has celebrated the accomplishments of its former students who have gone on to administrative positions in industry and government. Gale C. Blackmer joined this illustrious group in 2015, when she was named director of the Bureau of Geological Survey and Pennsylvania’s State Geologist. The bureau is one of six within Pennsylvania’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR).
The DCNR is charged with maintain and protecting 121 state parks, managing 2.2 million acres of state forest land, providing expertise about the state’s ecological and geologic resources, and providing technical assistance to benefit Pennsylvania’s rivers, trains, greenways, and natural areas. From her position as bureau director, Gale contributes significantly to many of the Commonwealth’s activities that involve the use and exploitation of its natural resources.
Gale holds a B.A. in geology from the University of Pennsylvania ’84 and a M.S. and Ph.D. ’87g ’92g in geology from Penn State. At various points in her career, she worked for a geotechnical drilling contractor, a small environmental firm in Philadelphia, and a hydrogeological firm in State College. She also served as a teacher and instructor at several of Pennsylvania’s undergraduate institutions, including West Chester University, Bloomsburg University, and Dickinson College. Along the way, Gale also served as an instructor at the Yellowstone Bighorn Research Association field camp and assisted in mapping exercises in Wyoming, Salt Lake City, and Alta, Utah. At Penn State she was a popular teaching assistant, a self-motivated and resourceful research student, and recipient of the best presentation in the 1992 Graduate Student Colloquium. Her peers respected her quiet demeanor, people skills, and leadership.
Gale started at the Pennsylvania Geological Survey in 1999, where her focus was on bedrock mapping in southeastern Pennsylvania. If pressed to identify a specialty, she would say it was structural geology and tectonics, although like most good mappers, she knows just enough about many disciplines to oversee and administer a wide variety of projects. Gale worked her way up from geologic scientist to manager of the mapping division before being tapped to lead the bureau in 2015.
In the literature, Gale is best known for her Tectonics paper, “Post-Alleghanian unroofing history of the Appalachian Basin, Pennsylvania, from apatite fission track analysis and thermal models” with Gomaa Omar from Gale’s undergraduate institution and Penn State emeritus professor Duff Gold. Gale’s work is based on apatite fission track analyses on twenty-nine Ordovician through Permian sandstones from the Appalachian Basin of Pennsylvania. Her Tectonics paper was seminal in helping scientists understand the two-phase tectonic exhumation of Appalachian Mountains.
Through Gale’s work we know that the initial and larger phase of exhumation accompanied the rifting of Pangaea with the opening of the Atlantic Basin during the Triassic. One of the nice touches of her paper involved cooling history model from apatite fission track data, with maximum temperatures constrained by vitrinite reflectance, which showed that cooling began soon after the Alleghanian Orogeny, except in the Juniata Culmination region, where synorogenic cooling and unroofing started during a thrusting event that formed an underlying duplex.
This observation is notable because to this day the Juniata Culmination on the Appalachian Plateau is a region of poorer gas production from the Marcellus Shale. After almost 200 million years of relative stability on the eastern seaboard of the North American lithosphere, a second phase of exhumation started in the Miocene, leading to the present topography of the Appalachian Valley and Ridge, and the later Adirondack Dome. Unfortunately, her note on the use of deformed esterid was never published.
At Penn State, she was a self-starter and independent thinker. She had the ability to spot the anomaly and the motivation and confidence to follow up. Gale is a well-rounded geologist with exposure to courses in archaeology, research in roof-falls in underground coal mines, as well as in the thermal history evolution of strata exposed in the Appalachian Plateau.
Janet S. Herman
by Susan Brantley,distinguished professor of geosciences
Not too long ago I ran into Janet Herman, almost unrecognizable under her ski gear, in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. An enthusiastic but inexpert skier, Herman is a well-known Penn State alumna of the Department of Geosciences. She is highly regarded for her work on groundwater geochemistry in karst, a type of geomorphological terrain that is vastly different from the Rocky Mountains where she often hikes and sometimes skis.
Herman’s work started at Penn State with her bachelor’s degree in 1977 for which she wrote a senior thesis with Dick Parizek, professor emeritus of geology, about using limestone as a reactive barrier for treatment of acid waters like those stemming from mine drainage. She wasted no time thereafter earning her doctorate in 1982. Her dissertation focused on the rate of dissolution of the minerals that define karst landscapes—calcite and dolomite. Her expertise in karst—how water dissolves limestone to create caves and subsurface flow paths—has been recognized repeatedly, perhaps most obviously in 2009 when she was named the Outstanding Karst Scientist by the Karst Waters Institute. Herman currently serves as president of the institute. Her love of karst followed naturally from her work with her dissertation adviser, Will White, professor emeritus of geochemistry. Now forty-five years after her first karst field trip with Will White and his wife, Bette White, a Penn State civil engineer, Herman still regards them as close friends and colleagues.
Perhaps because she was one of only two women at Penn State’s geology field camp in 1976 and one of only two women graduate students in her entering cohort in 1977, Herman has been steadfast in her work to increase diversity in the geosciences. During her entire nine-year career at Penn State, she points out that there were no women on the geosciences faculty, and only one woman was invited to give a departmental seminar. But her history at Penn State in this regard probably prepared her well for when she started her first faculty position at University of Virginia (UVA) in 1982 in the Department of Environmental Sciences, where she was the only woman on a faculty of twenty four. She rose through the ranks at UVA to become a highly regarded professor of environmental sciences, a title she still holds today.
What did it feel like to be the only tenured woman scientist in the College of Arts and Sciences at UVA when she earned that status in 1988? Herman felt strongly that she needed to help change the composition of the scientific community by training students. Luckily for UVA, Herman gets things done and does them well: she advised twenty-four women and nine men who earned thirty-three graduate degrees during her thirty-nine years at UVA. Over that same period, she advised twenty-four senior theses, of which thirteen were written by women. She received national-level recognition for her success in training women graduate students in a non-traditional scientific field in 1996 when she received the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) prestigious Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring. Those who bestowed the award noted that geosciences had long been a field that largely excluded women. Herman also earned the Outstanding Educator of the Year Award from the Association of Women Geoscientists in 2008 based on a nomination developed by two women undergraduate students.
Herman remains active supervising an interdisciplinary research and education program in groundwater contamination at UVA and in pursuing research and publishing papers. She has also served as program director in the Hydrologic Sciences Program at NSF. But her interest in science does not stop at research and student mentorship; she also seeks to use her knowledge of groundwater flow and transport to help communities understand issues of water contamination, including recent work with Penn State Department of Geosciences alumnae Dorothy Vesper (now at West Virginia University) and Ellen Herman (now at Bucknell University) to convene a Karst Waters Institute conference in Puerto Rico titled, “Groundwater Contamination and Public Health.”
Over the years, Herman has been an avid runner, even winning an award for most improved athlete of the year from the Charlottesville Track Club in 2007. Perhaps not surprisingly, she also worked hard to bring more women into running. In addition, after facing a bout of cancer at age 49, she became increasingly involved in fundraising for cancer research in her community. Eventually she was named one of the town’s “Distinguished Dozen” by the Charlottesville newspaper and recognized as a “Woman of Strength” for her fundraising and work educating women about cancer.
When Herman joins in a cheer of “We Are…,” she can truly be proud of changing who “we” are. Today, the department boasts 13 women faculty, 50 percent of graduate students and 46 percent of undergraduates are women, and the entire department is focused on increasing the diversity of the field. Herman’s career as both an undergraduate and graduate student at Penn State and her subsequent career at UVA have been part of our department’s history and trajectory toward greater inclusivity in the science.