2018-09-14 -   Prof. Bruce Fouke and collaborators at the Mayo Clinic have teamed up to use geological reasoning and high-end microscopy to learn fundamentally new and medically important things about human kidney stones! The project involves both advanced petrography of the stones and research into the role of microbes in their deposition- a unique combination of approaches honed by the Fouke group...

2018-08-31 - Students, staff and faculty of all three departments of the School of Earth Society and Environment (Geology, Atmospheric Science, and Geography and GIS) enjoyed warm, breezy weather for the annual "First Day of Class” Barbecue, August 27th, 2018.

2018-08-07 - Adjunct Professor Sam Heads, an internationally known insect paleontologist, recently brought a rare and valuable collection of Oligocene insect fossils to campus.  The story of the collection can be found at: http://storied.illinois.edu/a-donation-for-the-ages/

2018-07-12 - Prof. Michael Stewart and the Illinois students attending the Wasatch-Uinta Summer Field Course based out of Park City, Utah have been working hard and observing some of the best Geology the west has to offer. Prof. Stewart and Lecturer Max Christie drove with most of the students from Urbana to Utah, and made several stops in the Rocky Mountains on the way. They were treated to a special tour at...

2018-06-20 -   The NASA ESS fellowship is highly competitive, awarded to ~10% of applicants, and provides funding for up to 3 years to support graduate research. Yan's NASA ESS Fellowship will support the remainder of his PhD work, which is focused on applying the High Performance Computing data assimilation approaches that he has developed to investigate the 2006 eruption of Korovin Volcano in the...

2018-06-20 -   The prestigious NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program supports early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education. The 5-year CAREER award will support the research Trish and her students are conducting using sophisticated geodynamic models to investigate catastrophic caldera eruptions and forecast volcanic unrest and the...

2018-06-08 -   Jia Wang received the Best Student Poster Award from among 135 student participants in the Computational Methods in Water Resources Conference (http://cmwrconference.org/), held June 3 -7 in Saint Malo, France. Jia reported her latest experimental results and reactive transport model simulations of the combined effects of hydrology and geochemistry...

2018-05-30 - PhD graduate student Julia Cisneros has been awarded a Graduate Research Opportunities Worldwide (GROW) grant from the Division of Graduate Education at the National Science Foundation. This award will enable Julia to travel to the Netherlands in the summer of 2018 in order to pursue research for her doctoral thesis concerning the morphodynamics of alluvial sand dunes. This GROW award will allow...

2018-05-30 -   Professor Tom Johnson has been elected as a Fellow of the Geological Society of America at its Spring 2018 council. GSA Fellowship is an honor bestowed on the best in our profession in recognition of their distinguished contributions to the geosciences through publications, applied research, teaching, and administration of geological programs. Tom was recognized for his fundamental...

2018-05-11 - George Klein was born in The Hague, Netherlands, in 1933. The Klein family moved to Australia in 1939 and then to the United States in 1947, where George subsequently earned three degrees in geology, his bachelor’s at Wesleyan University, a master’s from the University of Kansas, and his doctorate at Yale, in 1960. George’s academic career began with a faculty position at the University of...

2018-05-02 - PhD candidate Haley Cabaniss, Prof. Trish Gregg and collaborator Prof. Eric Grosfils publish a paper in Geophysical Research Letters that lifts the lid on the precursors to supervolcano eruptions. In a new geodynamic modeling investigation entitled ‘The Role of Tectonic Stress in Triggering Large Silicic Caldera Eruptions’ (see online here), Geology PhD candidate Haley Cabaniss finds that large...

2018-04-25 - The class spent three days at the Great Sand Dunes National Park, Colorado, examining the geomorphology and sedimentology of a range of environments, from hillslopes and debris flows to shallow braided rivers to eolian dunes and playa lakes, and the sedimentary structures present in each. The group were lucky to gain an overview of the park from Park geologist, Dr Andrew Valdez, and then have the...

2018-04-23 -   Professor Trish Gregg was one of eight National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) Faculty Fellowship awardees for 2017-18.  Faculty fellows work with NCSA to help solve some of the grand challenges facing society.  Each one works closely with experts at NCSA on a project that aligns with NCSA's six thematic research areas and/or major projects (i.e., the Blue...

2018-04-10 - Prof. Jim Best was awarded the 2018 Jean Baptiste Lamarck Medal  by the European Geosciences Union at the EGU annual meeting in Vienna, April 9th, 2018.  The Lamarck Medal was established by the EGU Stratigraphy, Sedimentology and Paleontology Division, in recognition of the scientific achievement of Jean Baptiste Lamarck.  It is awarded to scientists for their...

2018-04-03 - Second year geophysics Ph.D. student, John “Jack" Albright, has been awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Prior to joining Professor Trish Gregg’s group at the University of Illinois, Jack completed a B.A. in Geology at Pomona College, and a Frontiers Abroad program at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Jack's doctoral research focuses on combining volcano-monitoring data sets...