This award will support the second biannual Structural Geology and Tectonics Forum, which will be held in June, 2012, at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. The forum will bring together specialists in structural geology and tectonics for oral and poster presentations, fieldtrips, short courses, and workshops for a total of seven days. The three days of presentations will include six sessions, one of which will focus on education. Each session will highlight an important area of current research and/or education, will be anchored by a distinguished keynote speaker, and will showcase relevance of work on the topic. Poster sessions with abundant time for full participant interaction will accompany each session. The forum will be organized to maximize the exchange of ideas between participants in open discussions. Sessions will provide ample opportunity to ask questions of individual presenters, assess the current state of our knowledge, and consider productive areas for future research.
In addition to the formal meeting, there will be fieldtrips, short courses, and workshops. These activities will take place in the two days before and after the forum. Fieldtrips will focus on different aspects of the structural geology of the North Appalachians and/or superb field examples of structural processes. Short courses will be held on using Google Earth and Google SketchUp for research and teaching, GPS technology and GIS software for fieldwork, and in situ mineral dating. Finally, workshops on building digital databases in structural geology, and maintaining research programs at community colleges, two-year colleges, and minority-serving institutions will be convened prior to and after the meeting, respectively.
The forum will be designed to facilitate community building and personal interaction within different segments of the structural geology community. It will bring together faculty from research universities, liberal arts colleges, community and two-year colleges, and minority-serving institutions. Importantly, there will be group discussions on critical developments in structural geology and tectonics, and what future research priorities should be. This community building effort will help create a stronger, more vibrant group of scientists and help introduce graduate students and advanced undergraduates to our discipline. This setting will be particularly useful for graduate students, who will be able to use the venue and informal nature of the forum to find out what research is taking place at other institutions, meet a wide range of faculty, and develop useful contacts. Students will also be able to present their own work in a friendly environment where they can obtain thoughtful and useful feedback, as well as providing opportunity to build new scientific collaborations. Abstracts, field guides, and short course notes will be disseminated through a dedicated website that will be publicly accessible.
was held June 12-18, 2012, at Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts. 105 and 5 cognitive scientists attended the meeting, and most stayed on the Williams College campus and dined together at the Faculty Club. Thirty graduate students were present at the meeting. There were no registration costs for the forum, and lodging and meal expenses were minimal, $80/day for lodging and three meals, thanks to support from the National Science Foundation and Williams College. Graduate student attendance was heavily subsidized. The anchor of the forum was three days of oral and poster presentations on a variety of research topics, including one half-day session on cognitive aspects of teaching a subject that relies heavily on visualization skills. There were twenty oral presentations during the six sessions, and 49 poster presentations. Thus, over 60% of the meeting participants presented during the forum. The informal nature of the meeting promoted a great deal of discussion. There were two days of field trips and short courses before and after the technical program. Field trips took geologist from eastern Massachusetts to the Hudson Valley of New York, and from the Berkshires in western Massachusetts to the Taconics in Vermont. The field trips were successful in generating discussions and sharing ideas between scientists with a wide variety of backgrounds and field experience. Workshops on analog deformation experiments, dating monazite, Google Earth, digital field mapping, and strain analysis programs provided participants with up-to-date views by experts in these fields. A complete schedule can be found here: www.geology.wisc.edu/~struct/mtg2012/. As noted above, the informal nature of the meeting promoted a great deal of discussion. The group identified a number of areas that clearly need more detailed work in all of the major topics covered during the meeting. Graduate students were able to communicate directly with faculty from many colleges and universities and exchange ideas with each other. We believe the forum helped foster a greater sense of community. We had a group brain storming session that provided ideas for a July meeting in Knoxville, Tennessee, on teaching Structural Geology, Tectonics, and Geophysics in the 21st Century (Sponsored through the NSF-funded 'On the cutting edge' workshops in the geological sciences). We also discussed the importance of creating a database for research in Structural Geology and Tectonics, and began organizing our efforts to create a White Paper defining the goals and challenges of our discipline. The thirty graduate students attending the forum were able to discuss their research projects and career goals with seventy-five professors from a variety of institutions. In addition, many new professors were able to get advice from more experienced teachers and researchers in an informal setting. Barbara Tewksbury of Hamilton College generously offered to facilitate the upload of PowerPoint presentations of oral talks, and pdfs of posters. Thus, anyone can view the presentations of individuals who uploaded their presentations. The link is: http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/structure/SGT2012/Williams_program.html. Basil Tikoff of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, edited: "Program with Abstracts from the Structural Geology and Tectonics Forum, June 14-16, 2012, Williams College", (2012). Printed abstract volume, printed by organizers. During the forum structural geologists interacted with cognitive scientists interested in the problems of teaching subjects that depend on three-dimensional visualization. Both groups benefited from this exchange of ideas.
