Message from the Department Head – 2024
Message from the Department Head
Hello again! I am so glad to have the opportunity to connect with you and share some of the incredible things happening here in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. After serving my first full year as head, I am even more enthusiastic about the current state and trajectory of our department. As you will read throughout this newsletter, the faculty, students, and alumni of EPS are a remarkable group of people engaging in leading edge science and education. We cannot fit everything I’d like to share into these pages, but the momentum is exciting.
As I shared last year, the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, is a “university on the rise,” and our department is growing as well. This fall, we welcomed more than 1,600 students to our classes and are providing more credit hours to campus than at any other time in department history. We are thrilled to have the opportunity to educate so many students about the importance of geoscience and scientific analysis. We recruited an outstanding graduate cohort, and we welcomed two new lecturers. Jordan Burkey is stepping in this year to teach structural and introductory geology. Meilian (Maggie) Chen has joined as an environmental geoscience lecturer who is also coordinating the environmental geochemistry teaching lab. They are both wonderful additions to our department.
The College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) began a three-year pilot divisional structure on August 1. EPS is in the Division of Natural Science and Mathematics. In practice, this means greater support for our department due to increased staffing at the college and divisional levels. The increased staff combined with greater tuition revenue from the expanding student population provides a solid framework for future growth for our department.
Presently, we are also searching for tenure-line faculty in the areas of structural geology and hydrogeology and water science, and I look forward to introducing you to these new department members next fall. We plan to keep this momentum going, and recently submitted a long-term hiring plan to the college with a plan to continue growing tenure-line faculty over the next three years.
Our research programs are robust and internationally recognized. As a small example, our faculty and students are leading missions on Mars, organizing international conferences in biogeochemistry, and conducting field work in places from Tennessee to Chile. At the annual GSA meeting in October, department members from undergraduates to emeriti presented 15 presentations ranging from planetary and structure to sedimentology and paleontology. We will be similarly strong at the upcoming AGU and LPSC meetings. Please join us at an alumni event at these conferences if you are nearby.
Last year, the department received an extremely strong decadal academic program review. We are working to implement recommendations from this review to make our program even stronger. Many of these initiatives will help us improve the student experience, including augmenting our field training program with targeted short term field courses. This will allow us to offer more of the field geology training our students need in department while also reducing barriers to participation for students from backgrounds traditionally less represented in the geosciences, including those with family obligations or financial need. We will be launching our first week-long intensive field course this May with a transect across the Appalachian Basin from Kentucky to the Blue Ridge of Virginia, where students will engage with sedimentary data collection, structural geology, petrology, geomorphology, and more. Stay tuned for updates on our social media streams and our newly revamped department website.
The support of our alumni and friends is so critical to ensuring the success of our students and faculty. The strength of our endowments and the continued new gifts over the past year have provided new support for graduate student fellowships, created a new endowed professorship, and provided funds that will help to offset the costs for students to participate in the new field courses. It is through your support that we are a department on the rise. We are so grateful for your continued support for our program and its people.
Please stay in touch and share your updates so we can include these in a future newsletter. Send an email to me or your favorite faculty or mentors. Stop by and visit Strong Hall when you are in Knoxville.
GO VOLS!
Alycia Stigall, Department Head
