I'm a professor of geoscience education at Wright State University, filling in for my colleague, Bill Slattery so he can get some papers written. Last year, I was a research associate at the Science Education Resource Center at Carleton College working on Starting Point, a website to help people teaching intro earth science. Before that, I worked as a post-doc, with Phil Camill at studying pollen records from southeastern Minnesota and western Manitoba. From 2000-2001, I was a lecturer with the University of Maryland - European Division, teaching general biology, math, and computer science to U.S. military personnel in Turkey, Bosnia, and Bahrain. I got my Ph.D. in Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior at the University of Minnesota, and worked as a graduate student and post-doc with the Limnologicial Research Center there.

Earth System Science

This spring will mark my fourth year teaching NASA's online Earth System Science course. Earth System Science is a multi-disciplinary course dealing with the origin and effects of all kinds of phenomena, from logging to meteor impacts, and ways that the dynamic components of the planet, such as the ocean and the biosphere, interact. I've developed an intensive Earth Systems History course that I teach in a classroom setting.

Quaternary Paleoecology

My major research interest is paleoecology, the study of the relationships among organisms and between organisms and their environment in Earth's past. The time period I'm working with is the late Quaternary, the past couple of hundred thousand years, marked by a series of intense, periodic glaciations affecting the entire planet. I study of microfossils: fossil pollen, diatoms, and charcoal fragments, from lake sediment. One of my recent projects was a record from Pittsburg Basin, Illinois. This sediment has been almost continuously deposited for the past 140,000 years. The resulting record spans the last two interglacials, the intervening ice age and a bit of the ice age before that. Currently, I am working on a pollen records from Manitoba. My colleagues and I are trying to work out the relationship between fire frequency and vegetation in the aspen parkland in the central part of that province.

Hobbies

I've been involved in role-playing gaming for nineteen years and have written up many of the characters and campaigns I've run since then. I've been attending conventions and gaming events ever since I went to college. These days, I attend conventions in the Twin Cities, like Con of the North and Convergence.

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Last updated 12 October 04.