9753190 Miller This POWRE award supports a Visiting Professor appointment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for Dr. M. Meghan Miller, Professor and Chair of Geology at Central Washington University. Bradford Hager, a Professor at MIT, is the faculty host. Miller will develop three inter-related research projects: 1) model results from seven years of GPS measurements in the Eastern California shear zone, in collaboration with MIT faculty, 2) geodynamical studies of the Tien Shan, and 3) seed future modeling of results from a new, permanent GPS array in the Pacific Northwest. In the first project, GPS observations of plate margin deformation in the Eastern California shear zone, data reduction in at CWU is mature, and the results are ready for modeling. In addition, MIT workers have observed a smaller, denser array in the Coso Hot Springs area, China Lake, for which this network provides regional context. Modeling and publishing results of this project will be a major focus of Miller's year at MIT. In the second project, CWU is partner institution on an NSF-EAR Continental Dynamics project in the Tien Shan of central Asia. Bradford Hager is the Chief Scientist on this twelve US investigator proposal. Miller is a member of the four co-investigator field geology team; Hager coordinates the GPS work. The visit will be a critical time for maturation of the collaboration on this multi-institution effort. The POWRE award will facilitate this collaboration. Finally, a visiting professorship would seed new GPS measurement and geophysical modeling projects for the study of deformation in the Pacific Northwest and the processes which drive it, under the auspices of the Pacific Northwest Geodetic Array.
