Interests
Along with being a little rock-obsessed, I have recently been exploring using rocks and minerals I’ve collected in the field and processing them for glazing pottery. Without a lot of lab equipment at my disposal, this pretty much consists of building a huge firepit, baking the rocks for several hours, and quenching them in icewater to make them more brittle for grinding (I’ve ruined several marble mortar and pestles already). I've also burned plants and created ash slurries. The first batch was fired in an electric kiln, which produced a lot of interesting oxidation effects.
(The main body of the bowl is glazed with basalt; the orange patches in the center are kelp ash.)
Background
I am a Master’s candidate at the University of Wyoming in the Department of Geology and Geophysics. I started the program in September 2014, joining the research team working on uranium roll-front deposits in Wyoming. Overall, I have taken a pretty untraditional route to get here.
I did my undergraduate degree in physics at Portland State University in Portland, OR, a radically hippy city with habitual rain but great beer. I managed to take a course on the Columbia River Gorge, my first introduction to the study of rocks and the beginning of bridging my interests from physics to geology.
After finishing my BS, I joined the US Peace Corps. I got a teaching slot in Namibia, Africa and was sent out to the tiny village of Omega in the middle of Bwabwata National Park in the Caprivi strip.
Omega is 270 km from the nearest town (Rundu) and has an amalgamation of Khoi San, Thimbukushu, and Silozi tribes. The community was established after Namibia gained independence from the apartheid regime of South Africa in 1991.
At the local school I taught English and math to grades 8 to 10, a bigger challenge than one might expect, since the local Khoi San dialect only went up to the number three. I also developed several after school projects with my kids.
(Just in case there’s any confusion, I’m the white one. These boys were part of my theater and concessions group.)
I returned from Namibia in June 2012 with some pretty exciting health problems, serious culture shock, and a strange affinity for clam chowder and ice cream. I ended up going back to school at the University of New Mexico and joined the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department where I picked up a bunch of core geology curriculum and got up to speed for graduate school.