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. |
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| 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. |
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Mike Ellis | Dr. Michael Ellis is the NSF Division of Earth Sciences program director who (with Bill Haq of the Oceanography Division) manages the CSDMS project at the NSF. He has his Ph.D. of Washington State University (1984) in active tectonics and its relation to landscape evolution. Ellis also brings experience and a strong desire in marrying communities in order to fashion a coherent and useful understanding and implementation of landscape evolution. Ellis has specific experience in developing landscape evolution models in connection with analyses of real and model landscapes; these models have been among the first to incorporate tectonic drivers, bedrock landslides, and heterogeneous climate forcings. Ellis is recently investigating the development of analog models of mountainous topography as a function of base-level fall, an investigation that parallels and reflects some recent theoretical complexity models by others. Ellis also brings to the CSDMS effort a specific interest in landslides and their relationship to both climate and seismic forcings. Mike has served as Associate Editor for the J. Geophysical Research, Earth Surface, and Solid Earth, and the Geological Society of America journal, Geology, and is currently on the editorial board for Basin Research. He has served on numerous review panels, most recently for the European Science Foundation's Topo-Europe panel, the National Oceanographic Partnership Progra for Coastal Effects of a Diminished Ice Arctic Ocean. |
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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. |
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| 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). Since 2000 he is employed at Delft Hydraulics where he has been working 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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 of 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 has 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| Dr. Tom Dunne is a professor at Donald Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, and Department of Earth Science, University of California, Santa Barbara. His current research interests are in hydrology and geomorphology and include: 1. Field and theoretical studies of drainage basin and hillslope evolution, 2) Hydrology, sediment transport, and sedimentation in river channels and floodplains, 3) Field studies and modeling of river-basin sediment budgets, 4) Sediment transport, channel migration, and oxbow lake sedimentation in rivers of the Central Valley, California. He has conducted field surveys and experiments to study hill slope erosion, mass wasting and floodplain sedimentation as well as meandering channel migration, in areas as varied as Kenya and the Pacific Northwest of the US. His field studies lead to formulation of mathematical process models, stochastical models and empirical relations. Tom's interest in the CSDMS is that he would like to retain current knowledge of modeling developments in Earth surface processes and contribute to incorporating empirical knowledge of processes into new models. |
The CSDMS Steering Committee (SC) is comprised of 8 members: 6 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.
