From csdms
CSDMS Steering Committee
 Chair | Dr. Rudy L. Slingerland received his graduate education in geology (M.S. 1974, PhD 1977) at Pennsylvania State University. He has served as a professor at Penn State for over 25 years. Between 1997-2003 he was Head of the Department of Geosciences and presently he is the Interim Associate Dean for Research, College of Earth and Mineral Sciences. He has mentored 29 MSc and PhD students and received the 2005 Wilson Award for Excellence in Teaching. His research interest is in sedimentary processes and deterministic modeling over a wide variety of environments and timescales. Current projects investigate; 1) clinoforms genesis in the Gulf of Papua, 2) the conditions that give rise to river channel bifurcations, 3) composition of sediment delivered to offshore basins, 4) geometry and internal characteristics of deltas, 5) the role of horizontal motions in orogenic landscapes in the Himalayas, and 6) Feedback loops between evolving land-use practices and sediment erosion off the landscape in the Appalachian mountains. Rudy has been closely involved with the CSDMS effort from the first hour; he has been part of the organizing committee for the workshops that laid out this initiative and was one of the lead authors on the CSDMS position papers. |
|
| Cecilia has Ms degrees in Engineering from Boston University and in Meteorology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Starting as a software Engineer at MIT Lincoln Laboratory at 1996 and later on at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Cecilia DeLuca developed an interest in the development of large, high-performance software systems and governance models for community software. Since 2002 Cecilia manages the Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF) Core Team who are responsible for building high-performance, flexible software infrastructure to increase ease of use, performance portability, interoperability, and reuse in climate, numerical weather prediction, data assimilation, and other Earth science applications. Thus, Cecilia blends expertise in high performance computing, software project management, Earth sciences, and community organization. As section head of the Earth System Modeling Framework, NCAR, she is principal investigator of several million dollar projects like the “Earth System Curator”; an effort to better integrate models and datasets. |
|
Tom Drake | Dr. Tom Drake is the Team Leader for the Coastal Geosciences program at the Office of Naval Research. The Coastal Geosciences program funds research to enable prediction of the 4D coastal, estuarine and riverine environments. Tom received a B.S in Geology from M.I.T in 1980 and a Ph.D. in Geology from UCLA in 1988. He was a research oceanographer and postdoctoral researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography until 1995, when he joined the faculty at North Carolina State University. As an associate professor at NCSU, Tom taught geomorphology, coastal processes, and sediment transport physics courses. He joined ONR in 2003. Tom's research interests include the physics of granular materials and sediment transport and he has published papers on field, experimental, and computational studies of transport phenomena at a particle-by-particle scale. Since joining ONR Tom's research interests have expanded to include aerial and satellite remote sensing, optics, acoustics, and development of unmanned vehicles for environmental sensing. Tom is the lead manager of the Community Sediment Transport Model supported by the National Ocean Partnership Program. |
|
| David Furbish is a professor of earth and environmental sciences and a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Vanderbilt University. David's research involves environmental fluid mechanics and transport theory applied to problems in hydrology and geomorphology, and the intersection of these fields with ecology. David has taught courses in introductory geology, hydrology and geomorphology, transport phenomena, and hydrodynamics. He is author of "Fluid Physics in Geology" (Oxford). David's interest in CSDMS centers on exploring ways to effectively incorporate stochastic properties of Earth-surface processes within numerical simulations of landform dynamics. |
|
| Dr. Bert Jagers graduated cum laude in 1995 in Applied Mathematics (M.Sc.), and also cum laude in Applied Physics (M.Sc.) at the University of Twente, the Netherlands. In 2003 he obtained his Ph.D. title from the Civil Engineering department at the same university for a study on the behavior and modeling of braided rivers. This study involved the analysis of detailed morphological processes in braided rivers, data acquisition in the Jamuna River, Bangladesh, and the numerical modeling of the large scale morphological changes using various modeling techniques (neural networks, object-oriented modeling, cellular models). He is currently working at Deltares on various (inter)national research and advisory projects in the field of river engineering and morphology. Research addressed a.o. non-uniform sediment mixtures, bank erosion, bed forms, and floodplain roughness. Currently he is as technical coordinator software development of the 1D, 2D and 3D modeling systems SOBEK and Delft3D involved in model coupling (OpenMI, ESMF) and the improvement and extension of physical process formulations. He is also involved in the ONR community efforts concerning Delft3D and the Coastal Sediment Transport Model. Bert is interested in the CSDMS effort to collect state-of-the-art environmental knowledge as much as possible into open and consistents frameworks of numerical components suitable for further research and operational use. |
|
| Boyana Norris received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2000. She joined Argonne National Laboratory as a postdoctoral researcher in 1999 and is currently a computer scientist in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division. She is actively involved in three main areas of research: scientific component software development, automatic differentiation (AD), and performance modeling and tools. She has been involved in the Common Component Architecture Forum since 1999, focusing on the development of components for adaptive linear system solution, as well as leading the component infrastructure usability effort and participating in component specification definition. In the area of automatic differentiation, the main focus is on the development of robust tools for the differentiation of C and C++ codes, and a modular design and implementation of automatic differentiation tools, enabling rapid AD algorithm development and reuse of differentiation strategies by front-ends for different programming languages. In the area of performance modeling and optimization, Boyana is performing research on performance bounds modeling and source analysis tools for estimating performance bounds of C and C++ code. She is also developing annotation-based empirical performance tuning tools, as well as component infrastructure for managing performance experiments and data. She has authored or co-authored over 50 publications and co-edited a volume on automatic differentiation. Boyana's interest in CSDMS centers on the application of component technology to (1) provide consistent interfaces to software developed within CSDMS and (2) ensure that the component software infrastructure and tools meet the needs of CSDMS researchers. |
|
| Chris Paola is professor of Geology at the University of Minnesota. He received his Ph.D. (1983) in Marine Geology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Prof. Paola has studied fluvial processes for many years and created one of the first models that captured the dynamics and time evolution of fully developed braided streams, a dominant contributor to the fluvial sedimentary record. Furthermore he worked on sediment fractionation in depositional systems, a major factor that drives downstream changes in fluvial morphology and sedimentary character. Other work of Prof. Paola has focused on the effect of statistical fluctuations on preserved stratigraphy, the formation of parallel lamination, and controls on rates of fluvial avulsion. Throughout his career, Chris tried to apply a mixture of theory, experiments and observations. Most of his experiments are carried out in a world-class facility known as the St. Anthony Falls Laboratory (SAFL).
He is co-founder and served as director of a NSF Science and Technology Center: the National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics (NCED) from 2003 till 2008. Chris' expertise in fluvial processes, his drive and interest to bring together scientists from a variety of fields to study the fundamental ways in which the Earth’s surface changes will be of great support to CSDMS. |
|
| Based at the University of Illinois Urbana, Professor Gary Parker shares an appointment in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (75%) and the Department of Geology (25%). After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, he spent five years in the Department of Civil Engineering (now Civil & Environmental Engineering) at the University of Alberta and 25 years at the University of Minnesota before moving to the University of Illinois in 2005. His research interests lie in morphodynamics associated with rivers, debris flows and turbidity currents. He has served as a consulting engineer for river intake and bridge problems, for the disposal of tailings from mines, for dam sedimentation, and for submarine sedimentation processes related to oil exploration and risk to submarine pipelines. |
|
| Dr. Rick Sarg received his Ph.D. (1976) in Geology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He holds an M.S. (1971) and a B.S. (1969) in Geology from the University of Pittsburgh. He has 31 years of petroleum exploration and production experience in research, supervisory, and operational assignments with Mobil (1976), Exxon (1976-90), as an Independent Consultant (1990-92), with Mobil Technology Company (1992-99) where he attained the position of Research Scientist, and with ExxonMobil Exploration (2000-05). Rick was a member of the research group at Exxon that developed sequence stratigraphy, where his emphasis was on carbonate sequence concepts. He has worldwide experience in integrated seismic-well-outcrop interpretation of siliciclastic and carbonate sequences. Rick achieved the position of Stratigraphy Coordinator at ExxonMobil Exploration Company. In August 2006, Rick joined the Colorado Energy Research Institute at the Colorado School of Mines as a Research Professor. He has authored and co-authored 30 publications and edited three volumes on carbonate stratigraphy, SEPM Special Publication 44 (1987), AAPG Memoirs 57 (1993), and 81 (2004). Rick is a GSA Fellow and active member of AAPG and SEPM. Rick recently completed a term as SEPM President. For the last decade, one of Rick's research interests has been to integrate stratigraphic observations with numerical process modeling to better understand and predict stratigraphy in the geological record. |
|
| Prof. James P.M. Syvitski received his graduate education in oceanography and geological sciences (Ph.D. in both, 1978) at the University of British Columbia, where he developed a quantitative understanding of particle dynamics across the land-sea boundary. He then worked as an Assist. Professor in Geology and Geophysics at the Univ. Calgary (1978-1981), and then as a Senior Research Scientist with the Geological Survey of Canada at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography 1981-1995). During the BIO period, Prof. Syvitski was appointed Adjunct Professor at Dalhousie U., U. Laval, Memorial U., and INRS-oceanologie. In 1995 James joined the U. Colorado - Boulder as a Professor of Geological Sciences, and until the summer of 2007 served as Director of INSTAAR - an Earth and Environmental Systems Institute. James has over 200 peer-reviewed publications, including authorship or co-authorship of 30 peer-reviewed books. He has served in a variety of editorial positions for a dozen international journals. Professor Syvitski has taken leadership roles in a variety of large International Projects (e.g. SAFE, ADFEX, SEDFLUX, COLDSEIS, STRATAFORM, EuroSTRATAFORM, CSDMS), and served in a variety of advisory roles for NSF, ONR, ARCUS, LOICZ, IGBP, IUGS, INQUA, SCOR, GWSP, and petroleum, mining, and environmental companies. During his career he has conducted fundamental research into fjord environments, sediment delivery by rivers, suspended particle dynamics, deltas and prodeltas, glacial and paraglacial sedimentation, computer modeling of sediment transport and stratigraphy, continental margin sedimentation, hyperpycnal flows, sediment-animal interactions, and particle characterization. In 2007 James became the Executive Director of CSDMS. |
|
| Dr. Dan M. Tetzlaff holds a Licentiate Degree in Geology from the University of Buenos Aires (1989), and M.S. (1983) and Ph.D. (1987) degrees in Applied Earth Sciences from Stanford University. As a graduate student, he developed one of the earliest three-dimensional sedimentary process models, SEDSIM, under the direction of John Harbaugh. In later assignments in industry, Dan developed well-log interpretation methods and software for Baker Atlas (1987-1990), performed research in petroleum geology and sedimentology at Texaco EPTD (1990-1994), and was Geoscience Application Development Manager at Baker Atlas (1994-2000). He then joined Western Geco (2000-2003) to develop a sedimentary process modeling package coupled with compaction and fluid expulsion (GPM) that assists in seismic interpretation of siliciclastic reservoirs. Dan joined Schlumberger-Doll Research in February 2003, as Senior Research Scientist. There he advised university research groups extending the GPM package to carbonate modeling, investigated image characterization and geostatistical methods, and incorporated Multipoint Geostatistics into a major commercial package. In January 2007 he transferred to Schlumberger Information Solutions in Houston as a Principal Research Scientist. Presently, his main scientific interest is the integration of geologic process modeling with advanced geostatistical techniques. Dan has published numerous technical papers on sedimentology, well logging, and geostatistics, one early book on sedimentary process modeling. Dan is interested in supporting any aspect of the CSDMS where his experience may be helpful, from technical aspects of model development and integration, to practical issues where contacts in industry and academia may be helpful. |
|
| Dr. Richard Yuretich is the Program Director of Geomorphology and Land-Use Dynamics at the National Science Foundation. Together with Bill Haq of the Oceanography Division he manages the CSDMS project at the NSF. His permanent position is Professor of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. His research over the years has been involved in a number of areas related to Earth-surface processes, with a focus on geochemistry of modern lacustrine and terrestrial environments and the geological record of their equivalents. Richard has been particularly interested in the weathering processes as documented by clay minerals, and how these are preserved and transformed in sedimentary deposits. A parallel area has been the geochemistry of river and ground waters, and their relationship to bedrock lithology and surficial deposits. This has extended to environmental problems, such as the production and remediation of acid mine-drainage. Direct interests in modeling are primarily as a user of geochemical equilibrium and reactive-transport models, and thus he encourages the development of more flexible models along these lines. Richard has been involved in NSF and NASA efforts to improve the teaching of undergraduate courses, on-line education and to provide better science preparation for prospective K12 teachers. |
The CSDMS Steering Committee (SC) is comprised of 12 members: 10 selected by the EC to represent the spectrum of relevant Earth science and computational disciplines, and 2 selected by Partner Membership. The cognizant NSF program officer or his/her designate, and the Executive Director or his/her designate, will serve as ex officio member of the SC. During SC meetings, there may be occasions when these ex officio members would exclude themselves from discussions.
The Steering Committee meets once a year to assess the competing objectives and needs of the CSDMS; will comment on the progress of CSDMS in terms of science (including the development of working groups and partner memberships), management, outreach, and education; and will comment on and advise on revisions to the 5-year strategic plan. The Steering Committee will provide a report to the Executive Director at the close of its meeting, to which s/he will respond within two weeks.
Previous Steering Committee members
| Previous SC Members | Period served |
|---|---|
| Dr. Mike Ellis | 2007 - 2008 |
| Dr. Tom Dunne | 2007 - 2009 |
