Jim Kasting
Jim Kasting retired in June, bringing to close a remarkable career. Kasting joined the Penn State faculty in 1988 as an associate professor of geosciences and meteorology. In 2003 he was named a distinguished professor of geosciences, and in 2012 he was named an Evan Pugh University Professor, the highest honor the University bestows on its faculty.
Kasting is a world expert in the evolution of Earth's climate and atmosphere. His investigations of the evolution of carbon dioxide and other atmospheric gases—oxygen, methane, nitrous oxide—provided insight into the proliferation of life on early Earth. His research has also focused on the study of habitable zones around other star systems, a field that is critical to the search for extraterrestrial life. He has made major contributions to the search for life on other planets, including refining the concept of the "habitable zone"—the area around a star where a planet can support liquid water and possibly life.
Kasting’s contributions to the department go well beyond his research. Kasting, together with Lee Kump and Rob Crane, evolved their work on earth system science into one of the most popular undergraduate courses offered by the department, and wrote a well-known textbook on the topic, The Earth System. And in his thirty-five years at Penn State, Kasting advised or co-advised many graduate students and postdocs, many who today hold prominent positions in NASA and academic institutions throughout the world.
Kasting is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, the Geochemical Society, the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. In his retirement, Jim will continue his affiliation with the department as an Inaugural Atherton Professor, a newly formed position for Emeritus Evan Pugh University Professors. We wish him all the best in his retirement.
Dave Bice
Professor Dave Bice has retired from teaching to launch a foundation focused on climate change adaptation and equity. Bice came to the department in 2004 from Carleton College where he aquired a national reputation for his work in cutting-edge curriculum design, including the development of innovative hands-on, active learning techniques.
In his eight years as associate head for undergraduate programs, he worked very hard to import these techniques to the department and he was instrumental in the development and launch of our Earth Science and Policy and Geobiology degree programs and our Earth and Sustainability certificate.
Over his tenure, Bice taught an impressively wide array of classes in the department and played a major part in our undergraduate program. He was uniquely poised to do this because of his extremely broad research background in structural geology, sedimentology, stratigraphy, and impact geology. He worked hard in several of the face-to-face and fully online classes to make them more active, for example by involving the intuitive modeling program STELLA in the Earth classes that allows students to explore the climate system through experimentation with models that they construct. He received the G. Montgomery and Marion Hall Mitchell Award for Innovative Teaching in 2011 for his leadership in active learning.
Bice inspired hundreds of students as well as those of us professors who were fortunate to have taught with him. He was especially effective because he always thought beyond the course, connecting material to other classes, and to an individual student’s interests. His warmth and humor transformed the atmosphere of a class into a collaborative, fun, and effective leaning environment. Teaching in the field was Bice’s true forte and one of his signature educational initiatives is the Italy field camp. He took between fifteen to twenty students to the Coldigioco field station several times where they took field geology and a range of other classes. The course was a transformative experience for the students, cementing their interest in geosciences, and spurring them to continue studies in graduate school.
Bice was also a wonderful faculty colleague, his remarkable breadth of geological expertise and
his insight combined with his warmth and generosity made collaborations productive and fun. On behalf of his many colleagues in the department, we thank him sincerely for his major contributions to the department.
Tim Bralower (with input from Sridhar Anandakrishnan, Roman DiBiase and Jim Kasting).