alumni reception - Syracuse Universe Department of Earth Sciences ...

doing this work, and I would like to thank those who
have contributed to the Endowed Student Research
Fund, as well as the Department of Earth Sciences, for
awarding me this grant.
Xuewei Zhang
I worked for Anadarko China as an Exploration
geologist prior to being enrolled in the Ph.D. program
in Earth Sciences at SU in fall 2009. From Insider
Anadarko, I had the opportunity to take a close look at
many of Anadarko sponsored G&G consortia projects
with universities and academic institutes around the
world. The Lacustrine Rift Basin research program
directed by Prof. Scholz was one of those projects.
I was very interested in the cool research done by
the group and wanted to get involved, and that’s
why I made my way to Syracuse. I found Syracuse
University by chance, but I chose to be here following
my heart.
As expected, my first year in the Dept. of
Earth Sciences has been pretty exciting and fruitful:
the courses I have taken, the exposure to various
department colloquia and activities, all the field trips
we made, and of course the research in which I have
participated within the Lacustrine Rift Basin group,
all helped reshape the way I am thinking as an Earth
scientist. One particular project, probably one of my
Ph.D. projects, I am currently working on is a global
study on sublacustrine channel and fan systems. The
key issues we want to address include: what favors the
initiation of sublacustrine channel and fan deposits;
what accounts for the architectural and morphological
differences (e.g., sinuosity of subaqueous channels)
among these deep lake channel-fan systems; and are
there quantitative relationships between channel-fan
morphologies and geological parameters. It will be
very challenging to characterize these sublacustrine
channel-fan systems that show a wide range of age,
location, and post-depositional process. Hopefully we
can find some interesting results.
Alex Zirakparvar
During the past year, I have continued to
make progress towards completing my PhD degree.
I am working under Suzanne Baldwin, who has an
NSF grant to study the formation and exhumation of
metamorphic rocks in Papua New Guinea.
In October, I passed the PhD qualifying exam.
Jeff Vervoort, who is a faculty member at Washington
State University, was my former M.S. advisor, and is
currently a member of my PhD committee, attended
the examination. During Jeff’s visit to Syracuse, we
were able to finalize the preparations to a manuscript
that we submitted to Earth and Planetary Science
Letters. As of this time, the manuscript is still in
review, but I hope that it gets accepted, as this will
bring me one step closer to completing my degree.
During the last year, I also finally published the
results of my Masters thesis in the Canadian Journal
of Earth Science (see Zirakparvar et al., 2010 in CJES
vol. 47). In February of this year, I was also chosen
to attend a National Science Foundation sponsored
workshop for the ion microprobe at the University of
California, Los Angeles. I learned a lot about the use
of ion microbeam techniques during this workshop,
and decided to present a bit of what I had learned at
the department’s informal graduate seminar after I
had returned from this workshop. I will be traveling
to UCLA again in July of this year to perform U-Pb
analyses of zircons, and will be making use of some
of the latest developments in resolving the spatial
distribution of U-Pb ages in single zircon crystals that
the team at the UCLA has been working on. I also
traveled to the GeoAnalytical lab at Washington State
University to perform geochemical analyses. At this
Alex collecting samples and data in
Papua New Guinea.
time I would also like to thank the Graduate Student
Publication Award and Marjorie Hooker Award funds,
since I received cash awards from both of these
sources this year.