No report. Sarah still doesn't have her notebook.
Kim Elam is working on the business cards. Kim is also working with Kim Linder on Central EYH publicity.
No report. Judges, make sure you sign up as special judges.
The materials arrived late from the Math/Science Network, but Adrienne had them with her at this meeting and handed them out. Adrienne has made three copies of the organizational packet, the student and the adult packet for the Southern Chapter, the Central Chapter and the Northern Chapter.
Remember: After the conference, please complete the evaluation form for the Math/Science Network and send it to Adrienne. She will send it on to the Math/Science Network. Also send Adrienne 10 copies of your brochures.
No report was available at the meeting, but was emailed to Carol La Delfe.
No report. EYH will be moved from March 8th to the 23rd.
The Silver City EYH Conference is scheduled for February 26, 2000 at Western New Mexico University. We are planning for 150 girls. There will be no adult portion of the conference as was mentioned earlier.
Progress has been slow. But, brochures are out. This next week we will really be making a push to get girls registered. Since this is our 8th year we have things pretty much under control. We have been and are giving assemblies in the schools for the girls to advertise the event. T-shirts are being made. Lunch will be in the cafeteria at $4.50 per girl. The girls will just go through the line. This is new. This is a much better price than in the past.
We have 12 names on the brochures for presenters, but believe we will have a few more than 12 presenting at the conference.
Everything seems late this year, but I'm also fairly confident that everything is going along OK.
Central is thinking about having joint meetings with SWE.
No report.
Steering committee meetings will be held the second Thursday of every month at 7AM in the Otowi Cafeteria.
The new LAWIS Newsletter Chair will be sending out newsletters around the first of the month, every month. Any articles should be forwarded to Laura by the 15th of the month in order to make it into the next month's newsletter.
Bylaws will be changed to make the fiscal year match the network's fiscal year.
Ann Mauzy is in the process of ordering the career's booklets at Alpha Graphics, but needs to know how many we should order (2000, 2500, or 3000).
No report.
This chat fest comes to you from the treasurer of NMNWSE. One of my principal reasons for joining our organization was for the networking that I thought this membership might offer. At the last several board meetings, we have been banging our heads over ways to enhance this part of our name. Our annual meeting definitely serves this purpose, but happens only once a year and is attended by less than half the membership. One solution, easy to implement, is for all of us to use the newsletter as more than a repository for the minutes of our board meetings. The newsletter, after all, is mailed to the entire membership. We can use it to crow about our achievements, to announce our professional talks, to plumb issues that concern us as women scientists and engineers, and to convey to one another who we are and what we are all about. What I'll do here is tell you a little bit about my trajectory (what landed me where I am right now), a little bit about my work (which is evolving daily), and a little bit about issues that concern me.
A brief biography of a black sheep
Everybody in my family does business. Amongst the five of us children (hardly children now that everyone is >39), three have their own businesses. One brother Steve heads up the 75-year-old family fundraising business. My sister Anne is the principal of her own landscape architectural firm. My sister Jean is the creator and sole owner of a high-end women's clothing store. My brother Paul, with nearly 20 years of sales and management experience in the realm of hospital supplies, is on the verge of splitting off and founding his own company. And then there's me. I never had a paper route. I never sold anything door-to-door. And I'm a scientist.
The only scientific influence in my early life was living next door to a fraternity of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. I remember my mother telling me about the time she begged for a chemistry set for Christmas and got a bicycle instead. In 2nd grade, I won a fire prevention contest with an essay about spontaneous combustion. I got a book thrown at me for correcting my 5th grade teacher's blackboard math. In 6th grade, I won a knot-tying contest. In high school, I had really lousy math and science. In biology, my fish dissection resulted in identification of nothing more than "filets." Actually, my chemistry teacher was an inspiration. He had recently finished a PhD at Harvard and took several of us there during an Exploration Week to work on cataloguing references to specific astronomical observations in notebooks of the Harvard Observatory. OK, that was a positive influence that probably made a difference.
In college, I chickened out of majoring in geology because in my FIRST geology class the professor wrote some differential equations on the blackboard and said that those of us who hadn't had physics and calculus yet didn't really need to worry (I worried). I didn't even know what calculus was. So I majored in American Studies and focused on energy and environmental issues (kind of foreshadowing my current occupation). It wasn't until after college, while I was working at Shelton Energy Research in Santa Fe, a small, independent wood energy research lab, that I discovered I could do science. I took evening courses in College Algebra, Calculus (!), Physical Geology, and Chemistry at Santa Fe Community College and UNM Los Alamos. After that, I knew I was ready to get the geology degree I always wanted. This decision coincided with my boyfriend-at-the-time's decision to go to film school in Los Angeles. I decided to go out there and get a Master's degree in geology.
Fairly accustomed by then to brazen self-promotion, I called up the chairman of the Geological and Planetary Sciences Division at Caltech and asked about their Master's Program. Jerry Wasserburg told me that they didn't really have a Master's program, and they really wouldn't take me with so abysmal a background. To his credit, he was very kind, and offered me a solution that worked in the end. He suggested I get a Master's degree from Cal State Los Angeles, which had a very good field-based geology program. Then, he said, I could come to Caltech for a PhD (I couldn't think that far ahead).
I got the degree from Cal State. Took me 4 years because I was starting effectively from zip. A year of physics, a year of chemistry, calculus, all the undergraduate geology, field courses, master's level seminars, research and writing. By the time I was ready to begin my research, I had decided the film school boyfriend was going to spend the rest of his life in LA so I went out and found me a man with ties to New Mexico. He has stuck with me through thick and thin (a lot of thin), including two stints in Los Angeles, a doctoral program, recovery from the doctoral program, two postdocs hyphenated by a consulting job, an academic job search, and now what feels pretty settled, a technical staff position at LANL.
The short story on the rest of my graduate education (I went through 26th grade) goes like this. I finished the MS at Cal State in 1989, having done my thesis in the Rio Grande rift while on a fellowship at LANL. I then went to Harvard for a PhD. It took me a year to get my sweetheart (now husband) Tim to move to Cambridge (he was stalling because there was talk my advisor would move to Caltech and he didn't want to go to LA again). He moved out once she decided to stay at Harvard. Then within a year she decided to take Caltech's offer. So we went to LA again, not happy. It all turned out fine in the end. I did my thesis research in Baja California on volcanic and structural geology of the Gulf of California Extensional Province. After I finished the PhD, we went to Spain for 15 months on a Fulbright Fellowship. We lived in Barcelona and I did research at the University of Barcelona, which started a whole string of research projects which have taken me back there many times over the last 4 years. An idea I had to work on volcanic rocks from NE Spain formed the core of my postdoctoral fellowship at LANL, which I started in 1996. I became a TSM in the Earth and Environmental Sciences Division at LANL in 1999.
These days I work on seismic hazards in the vicinity of LANL, fracture systems and fluid flow, and continuing work in Spain on basalt geochemistry related to thinning of the Earth's lithosphere and deformation of young river terraces due to erosion and uplift of the Pyrenees. Big issues that concern me right now are the low representation of women in the sciences, and more generally in positions of intellectual, political, and economic power. I am beginning to hatch a project with the Association of Women Geoscientists entailing creation of a Web page and CD showcasing achievements of women in the geosciences. And just this morning I had an idea I might start a magazine for young women that focuses on intellectual achievement and career trajectories as a means of filling the void left by all the magazines that kill self-esteem and engender exclusive attention on physical appearance.
I leave you with a request. Any body out there reading this, send us YOUR biography, or tales of a big success, or a story that made you feel good about who you are and what you do. We'd like to get a steady stream going, so we can put the networking into NMNWSE.
My LAWIS talk on March 14th will feature the work I am doing in Spain with American and Spanish collaborators on the river terraces of the Rio Cinca in the Ebro basin and south-central Pyrenees. The abstract of the talk (below) details our recent results, which I presented in October at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Denver.
Using Quaternary dating methods, stratigraphy and patterns of stream incision to constrain models of post-orogenic rock uplift: Preliminary results from the Ebro basin, Spain
Claudia J. Lewis (LANL), Eric V. McDonald (Desert Research Institute, Reno, NV), Carlos Sancho Marcén and José Luis Peña Monné (University of Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain)
In the central Ebro basin (Spain) and adjacent Pyrenees, we are testing models of post-tectonic rock uplift using patterns of stream incision constrained by Quaternary stratigraphic and dating methods. To reveal spatial distribution and rates of incision, we correlate terrace remnants along principal rivers orthogonal to the Pyrenean axis, determine numeric ages, and reconstruct paleo-longitudinal stream profiles for comparison to modern profiles. The large separation between terraces in this area, and their great longitudinal and lateral extent, facilitate mapping and correlation of terrace remnants and measurements of terrace deformation. Because ages are critical for calculating incision rates, we use various Quaternary chronometric methods including radiocarbon, luminescence, and cosmogenic nuclide profile dating, and magnetostratigraphy. We also use time-related trends in soil development on surfaces as a primary means of correlating terrace remnants, since numeric dating techniques are expensive and dateable material relatively rare. We recently completed field descriptions and sampling of a spectacular terrace sequence along the lower Rio Cinca. Broad terrace treads are overlain by <10 m of well-sorted, stratified sandy gravel, suggesting a predominance of strath terraces and therefore age-equivalent terrace treads and deposits. Terrace soils show strong time-related trends related to pedogenic accumulation of calcium carbonate, including carbonate mass, degree of carbonate cementation, thickness and strength of horizonation, and total profile thickness. Soils are clearly invaluable for maximizing age control and developing regional correlations among terrace sequences. Based on general comparisons with soils formed in similar semi-arid environments in the western U.S., we assign tentative age estimates (possibly correlating with glacial outwash events) as follows: T4, 50-80 ka; T5, 150-250 ka; and T8, 600-800 ka. Strath heights of 35-40 m (T4), 55-60 m (T5), and 115-120 m (T8) above the modern channel suggest preliminary incision rates of 0.1-0.8 mm/yr. Ultimately, this project will provide a precise Quaternary chronology, a basin-wide correlation of river terraces, and a model of post-tectonic rock uplift that will prove essential to Quaternary studies on the Iberian peninsula and elsewhere.
