Welcome to our annual magazine, which is one of the ways we share stories from our past year and reconnect with our alumni and friends. The department is quite healthy, with a steady or slightly growing enrollment. We continue to have about two hundred undergraduate students and roughly eighty graduate students in our various degree programs.
Our department and its programs continue to be highly ranked nationally and internationally. Research expenditures continue to demonstrate excellence, with most of the funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA), and the Department of Energy (DOE). We are fortunate to be able to share these successes with our alumni and friends, who also support our efforts with generous support to our students and programs. Thank you for your continued support.
In this magazine, we welcome two new faculty members. Nicolas Choquette-Levy, who is joining our department this coming winter, and conducts research focused on using geoscience data to facilitate local governance frameworks for climate adaptation. Eric Kirby joins our department this coming summer as our next department head. Eric’s research focuses on the interplay between climate, erosion, and tectonics during the growth and decay of mountain ranges.
This year, we celebrated the remarkable geochemistry career of Sue Brantley, who retired at the end of 2024. Over her career, she was a tremendous force in both research and teaching, positively impacting many of our students and publishing a numerous highly cited papers. One of our challenges as a department will be replacing the oversized impact Sue had on all of our work and how she elevated our department.
The past summer saw our first implementation of our new four-week field camp structure. The students had a great experience learning GIS and field mapping in Utah, Montana, and Wyoming. Ensuring such authentic, hand-on experiences is one of the areas for which our alumni support is most evident. Support from alumni and friends enhances these types of educational experiences and makes these experiences affordable to our students.
I am only an acting department head, slipping into this role for a year before Eric Kirby arrives. This year, I have gained new perspective on how special our department is. We have outstanding faculty and staff, excellent students, and supportive alumni and friends.