For the 9th consecutive year, Michigan Tech’s Peace Corps program is ranked 1st in the nation for having the largest number of Peace Corps Master’s International students. This clip (http://abc10up.com/michigan-tech-garners-national-acclaim-for-peace-corps-program/), which aired on ABC 10 News Tuesday, May 13, 2014, included interviews with two of our department’s returning Peace Corps Volunteers. Edrick Ramos and Tyler Barton were able to share their experiences. The clip also featured photos courtesy of Jay Wellik and Brie Rust.
In May 2014 this year’s senior design capstone group focusing on petroleum engineering was invited to the Northern Michigan Society of Petroleum Engineering (SPE) and the Michigan Oil and Gas Association (MOGA) meetings. Their talk, “A Technical Evaluation of the Sycamore Limestone Formation in the Anadarko Basin of Oklahoma” was presented at the SPE meeting where they were commended for the amount of work they were able to accomplish over two semesters. Data for the project was provided by Vitruvian Exploration LLC, and student travel was funded by Apache Corporation.
Geoscientists Without Borders®, the humanitarian program launched by the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG) six years ago, will sponsor a Michigan Technological University project concerned with predicting activity at the Pacaya volcano in Guatemala that erupted as recently as 2 March this year. Michigan Tech will perform the field work under the leadership of principal investigator Professor Thomas Oommen.
On April 13, about 250 students gathered for the 2014 Greek Life Awards in the MUB Ballroom representing the Michigan Tech Fraternities and Sororities. This is the eighth year of the awards ceremony, but it was the first year for the Outstanding Faculty Award to be included in the program. The Outstanding Faculty Award for 2014 was presented to Jeremy Shannon.
Order of Omega, the Greek Life Honor Society that coordinates the awards, wanted to find a way to recognize the faculty members that the students consider to be the most outstanding. There are almost 500 students in fraternities and sororities at Michigan Tech, and Order of Omega really wanted to emphasize that this award would be coming directly from the students.
The following faculty members were nominated by members of the Greek community and were recognized at the 2014 Greek Life Awards Ceremony:
* Mari Buche (SBE)
* William Sproule (CEE)
* John Durocher (Bio Sci)
* Jeremy Shannon (GMES)
* Marika Seigel (HU)
Congratulations to Rachael Pressley, Senior Geology student on winning 1st place in the Undergraduate Student Poster competition last Friday. Her project
“Questioning Uplift Rates for Suwannee River Basin, Florida”
was under the direction of Dr. Jason Gulley.
She will present this again for World Water Day on Wednesday, March 26, from 4-5pm in the Dow Lobby (campus side).
Very proud of her accomplishment!!
Environmental Engineering Seminar: Nuts and Bolts of Unconventional Oil and Gas Development including all you might like to know about the technology and practice of hydraulic fracturing
Wayne D Pennington, Interim Dean, College of Engineering, Michigan Technological University
Mon Mar 24, 2014 3pm – 4pm, Dow 642
Watch the seminar Video on Vimeo: Unconventional Oil and Gas Development: Technology and Practice of Hydraulic Fracturing
Over the past couple of decades, technology has been developed to produce oil and gas from geological formations that had been overlooked previously due to the lack of appropriate engineering techniques for those types of formations. As a result, the energy picture for the USA and for the world has been seriously modified, and the impact is being felt.
Michigan Tech faculty, staff members and students received awards tallying $71,175 in funding through the Michigan Space Grant Consortium (MSGC) sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
Alexandria, VA – The American Geosciences Institute (AGI) and Schlumberger welcome former Peace Corps volunteer and geoscientist, Stephanie Tubman as the AGI/Schlumberger Geoscience Communication Fellow. Through a generous donation from Schlumberger, a global service provider to the oil and gas industry, Tubman will be working with AGI’s Critical Issues Program to disseminate geoscience information to help support decision making at the federal, state and municipal levels.
At a recent student “Challenge Bowl” competition organized by the Society of Exploration Geophysicists at the University of Oklahoma, a team of Michigan Tech students came in third. They were the only team composed of undergraduates to make the final round and they were also the only team with any females to make the finals.
“This is the third year that Michigan Tech students have participated in this competition, and our students consistently perform extremely well,” said Wayne Pennington, interim dean of engineering and faculty advisor for the Michigan Tech student section of SEG. “This year’s team consisted entirely of undergraduates, and they were up against formidable opposition from advanced graduate students, defeating almost all of them. We are very proud of their performance, and I personally am very pleased that Neala Creasy and Stephanie Dow were the students who chose to compete on our behalf.”
Department of Geological and Mining Engineering and Sciences Seminar
Friday, March 21, 3:05-3:55 pm, Dow 610
Ice, Rocks, and Robots, Oh My!–Paving the Yellow-Brick Road to Europa
Victoria Siegel, Ph.D. Student
GMES, Michigan Technological University
Astrobiologists agree that Jupiter’s moon Europa is one of the most promising places where our solar system might harbor life (besides Earth, of course). Data from Galileo and Hubble’s recent images of possible water vapor plumes escaping from Europa’s surface suggest that a liquid water ocean lies concealed beneath the moon’s thick ice shell. Over the past ten years, NASA has funded several projects to investigate autonomous systems we might use to explore this strange and challenging environment. As they are developed, these robots are put to good, practical use in terrestrial Europa-analog environments. From an Alaskan glacier, to flooded sinkholes in Mexico, to an ice-covered sea in Antarctica, these ‘bots are helping us explore, map, and understand extreme environments and life forms on Earth–all the while bringing us closer to making Europa sub-surface exploration a reality. If you think the Curiosity Rover is wild (it is), come see what planetary exploration could look like in the future.