Chair's Greeting
(by Abhijit Basu)

This year, we celebrate the final fruition of the generous contributions and incessant work of many alumni for over a decade to establish various endowments. The last few years have been incredibly successful years in the history of our department. Not only have our continuing faculty produced much and been honored with many accolades, but between 2001 and 2005 we have been able to attract and add six new faculty members.

All of this has been possible as a direct consequence of the campaigns run by the members of our Advisory Board beginning in 1996. The campaign has resulted in the hiring of Mark Person in 2001 as the Malcom and Sylvia Boyce Chair in Hydrogeology, of David Bish in 2003 as the Haydn Murray Chair in Applied Clay Mineralogy, of Bradley Ritts in 2005 as the Robert R. Shrock Professor in Sedimentary Geology, and of Kaj Johnson in 2005 as the Judson Mead Professor of Applied and Exploration Geophysics (Kaj will begin his residency in fall 2005 and will assume formal faculty responsibilities in fall 2006). In addition, Jürgen Schieber and Chen Zhu joined our faculty in 2003 as associate professors in lines left open through retirements and left unfilled for a few years. The whole faculty has been inspired by the new hires and the annual seed money for research, which is drawn from the interests of the endowments. In 2004, our external grants nearly tripled over the steady average of the previous few years.

Please read about multifarious activities and achievements of our faculty, new and old, in Faculty News on page 11 of the 2005 Hoosier Geologic Record. I refrain from taking the thunder away from individual write-ups, but I would like to highlight at least two. Haydn Murray brought a crowning glory to the department again by being inducted into the National Academy of Engineers (the only one from Indiana University in its 177-year history) and in receiving an honorary degree from Indiana University, the highest honor that any university can bestow on an individual. And, Professor David Bish and Professor Jürgen Schieber have been selected by NASA to help design two separate instruments of a total of only eight in the Mars Science Laboratory, a Lander, to be launched in 2009.

Accountability is a word that is often bandied around in the media and in political circles as a cliché. Accountability, however, is actually a social responsibility. The time has come for us to account to the alumni and all donors. This I do with great pleasure and not as a matter of formal duty. I describe below a few of the main expenses that we have been able to incur for advancing our department and supporting our students as the donors have wished.

Three graduate fellowships are now funded routinely from endowments in the names of Galloway-Perry-Horowitz, Dan Tudor, and Bill Thornbury. The College of Arts and Sciences provides tuition waivers to the recipients, enabling us to stretch the value of the fellowships. This year we will also add money to a gift from Chevron-Texaco to award two additional fellowships. Not only do fellowships free up time for students to conduct more intensive research, they also allow us to compete with other schools in attracting qualified graduate students.

This summer we instituted, on a trial basis, summer fellowships for graduate students without other summer support to stay on campus and conduct research. This is in addition to grants-in-aid of research that students receive from alumni gifts to supplement costs that are not commonly covered by extramural grants. We have also instituted cash awards for students who publish peerreviewed papers in standard journals before graduation. This incentive should go far and make us far more visible in the professional world than before. And, we continue to recognize excellence of our students in the form of awards and scholarships. Many of these go to those attending our time-honored G429 at the Indiana University Judson Mead Geologic Field Station. But in addition, recent major gifts from Bill and Janet Cordua and one from the family of Maynard and Winnie Coller underwrite two sizeable undergraduate scholarships.

A few years ago students started an entirely student-driven event to showcase their research in the form of oral and poster presentations in spring. This has now expanded to include presentations by students from other Indiana schools, such as Purdue, IUPUI, and other campuses. Judging is done by faculty from several campuses, geologists from the Indiana Geological Survey, and most graciously by alumni who fly in from distant locations such as Houston and New Orleans. The awards ceremony is the most-anticipated time of the day, and all winners greatly appreciate the cash awards from gifts by well-wishers.

Support from the College for student travel is dwindling fast. It is only because we have the support from our well-wishers that we can afford all-important field trips for our majors and graduate students. Professor Robert Wintsch, for example, has started to lead extended field trips that are not required for any course but that enhance students' understanding of how the earth works. This year, he led 10 students to Canada and Maine to study the tectonics of the northeastern coast of North America. We are providing scholarships to three students who intend to major in geology and are taking a field course with Professor Michael Hamburger in the Sierra Mountains in California. We continue to partially defray the cost of student travel to national and international meetings where they present papers. We are particularly delighted that our students travel abroad, especially to Europe and open new frontiers. With globalization and the internationalization of employment, such experience becomes invaluable for our graduates.

For several years we have been routinely supplementing faculty research from the interest of endowment funds. These have included direct expense for fieldwork, laboratory analyses, purchase of equipment, and travel to meetings on a limited basis. Such support has proven indispensable as seed money for new research and in attracting extramural support.

Our colloquium series in which we invite experts from other institutions to come and visit with students and faculty is nearly fully funded from gifts. Two of these colloquia are very dear to us. One is the lecture delivered by the winner of the Owen Award, with which we honor a graduate of this department. The other is the Daniel Tudor Commemorative Lecture, which was set up in the loving memory of one of the department's most supportive alumni. Please attend either or both of these lectures at your convenience.

Perhaps it is appropriate to end with a request for something that deserves your attention. As funds for higher education shrink, the College is finding it difficult to continue to support the Judson Mead Geologic Field Station in Montana. We would appreciate your thoughts and ideas on a strategy for approaching industry about the creation of a corporate consortium to underwrite a $2 million endowment that would make the field station self-sufficient.

I come from an ethnic and cultural stock known for its emotional, if not sentimental, disposition. Writing the abbreviated accountability statement above has made me so gratefully happy that my eyes are moist (I confess). "Thank you" are two words that cannot describe how each in the department feels about the generosity of all well-wishers who make our day, everyday.