A group of scientists, educators and experts will lead a summer course in 2008 that will provide 15 graduate students from around the US an introduction to Geobiology. The course includes integrating earth history into studies of modern systems, and vice versa. The summer experience will start in Golden, Colorado and then visit sites in and around Yellowstone Hot Springs and also the Green River Formation in W. Wyoming. Students will be seeing unusual sites where energy supplies are rare yet life thrives, where mineralization is actively capturing evidence of biotic and abiotic processes and where modern and fossil biosignatures are present. Following the field trip, course participants will convene for 4-5 days at the Colorado School of Mines to do lab work and learn about molecular biology, cloning and sequence analysis. The group will move to the USC Wrigley lab on Catalina Island. Select samples, collected from the Green River Formation, will be extracted for organic compounds. Students will also have access to petrologic analyses of thin sections (obtained ahead of time) and will use a novel environmental SEM. Student projects will be guided by visiting faculty and a final report/poster/presentation will be assembled. During this time, there will be more lectures from visiting faculty and lab work on projects. Among the instruction that will occur while students are at Catalina will be lessons on thermodynamics and modeling. In total, the 2008 summer course will be three weeks in duration. The student-instructor and student-student interactions are facilitated through a team-oriented, research-based curriculum and by their close interactions during field trips, in the collegial atmosphere of the marine field station on Catalina Island, and across the laboratory bench-top.
