MESSAGES FROM THE FACULTY
The last two years have brought some fairly big changes for me. First, I stepped down from the department chair's job after five years. Second, I have just been promoted to Full Professor. Both changes are most welcome and I am having a good time getting back into my research. I am in the first year of a two-year NSF grant to study the strain and geochemical changes accompanying cleavage formation in the Taconics and am having a blast! The big discovery has been finding graptolites in the slates. These fossils are almost perfect strain markers and we have gotten some really good strain measurements from the first year of study. For the most part, the graptolite strains confirm the earlier work we did using reduction spots as strain markers.....thank goodness! I'll spend this comming summer searching for more graptolites and I have two really terrific students who will be working with me on this project. The other work on geochemistry is largely complete and I have a spreadsheet of chemical analyses which is almost too large to handle. Next Fall I will be on sabbatical and, in addition to trying to get the graptolite and geochemical work published, I will be spending a few weeks at the University of Wisconsin working on stable isotope analyses of veins from the Taconics. Of course, I might find the time to do some cycling as well!