Two students in the geology department were awarded graduate research fellowships from the prestigious Wyoming NASA Space Grant Consortium.
UW doctoral candidates Claire Lukens and Tyler Brown were awarded $20,000 in grants, which will allow them more freedom in their research.
Receiving the NASA grant “means that I can focus on my research and I don’t have to TA for the next year,” Lukens said.
Originally from Seattle, Lukens said she chose UW because it has a great graduate program. Her ultimate goal, she said, is to teach at the collegiate level.
“I’m pretty excited about science literacy, about getting people into science that aren’t already. I think it’s really important for being able to talk about things like climate and energy,” she said.
Lukens’ focus is geomorphology.
“I study the surface of the Earth and how landscapes evolve and how erosion happens,” she said. “I got interested in it from a storytelling point of view. If you go and look a spot on the landscape you can say ‘this was an ocean x number of million years ago and then it became a beach and then it became a mountain.’ So, that kind of telling the story of a landscape through time is what sucked me into it. And I like it because it’s really hands on. You can go and pick it up and hold it and play with it.”
Lukens’ self-motivation towards research has impressed her advisor Dr. Cliff Reibe.
“She’s got a really strong quantitative side and she’s real excited about research and at the same time she’s also really interested in teaching. She is everything a professor could want for a graduate student. She’s also really good about going out and getting her own funding,” he said.
Brown similarly looks forward to making the most of the grant.
“This is just an outstanding opportunity to get to pursue my research wholeheartedly. The only thing I have to focus on for the year are my courses and this research,” Brown said.
Even though UW is landlocked, Brown’s research takes him to the greatest depths of the ocean.
“I am looking at microscopic mineral relationships from rocks in the bottom of the sea floor and below the bottom of the sea floor to try and figure out how a big chunk of Earth’s crust is formed at mid-ocean ridge,” he said. “I was lucky enough to get a hold of some samples that were recently collected from an IODP [Integrated Ocean Drilling Program]crew. They drilled down into the Pacific Ocean and recovered a whole bunch of rock samples.”
“The ultimate goal is to really hone in on the processes of crust formation in the subsurface,” he added. “It’s large scale Earth processes. One of the unknowns that remains with plate tectonics is what’s happening at the subsurface at these extensional boundaries.”
Brown also sees himself teaching in the future. He said the idea of doing research, asking his own questions and explaining how the earth works has been a goal for a while.
Brown’s advisor, Dr. Mike Cheadle, spoke highly of Brown’s character, saying, “He’s a pleasure to teach because he’s such a nice guy. It really makes a difference if a student is respectful.”
As a teaching assistant, Brown also is very generous with his time and the undergraduates really seem to like him, Cheadle said.
The graduate fellowship grant is open to any Masters or doctorate candidates in science, math, technology or engineering. The grant funds research for one year and recipients can only receive one NASA grant during their college career.
