View of Mineral King, Sequoia National Park, CA, where I did my PhD research (see CV) and have since led many society and class field trips.

Teaching Statement

Like my research, my teaching covers a wide range of topics, including summer field camp, Sedimentology and Stratigraphy, Volcanology, Tectonics of Sedimentary Basins, Geology of Mexico, Turbidite Sedimentology, and Sequence Stratigraphy. I enjoy teaching other professionals, and offer also short courses on these topics at conferences and for the petroleum industry.
My biggest commitment is to graduate student education. I enjoy having several graduate advisees, and nearly all of them publish papers with me.

Lower Division courses:
I helped to develop our very popular course, Geological Catastrophes, and I continue to teach it every year. In a 2002-2003 student survey, it was rated the second most popular class on campus (after “Human Sexuality”, which would be pretty hard to beat!). One of my innovations is the integration of DVD clips into my lectures with still photos. I have culled through literally hundreds of hours of videotape that I have collected over the past 20 years, and selected the most exciting and relevant sections to extract and fuse seamlessly, and organize by topic in DVD menus. Many others in the department have used these DVDs in their teaching in the past two years. My extensive collection of still photos allows the students to learn how to recognize the eight main types of volcanoes in all their future world travels, at freeway speed or from a plane, and understand the controls on their hazards. The stills also help them recognize faults, landslide areas, and coastal erosion areas. But the DVDs bring the processes to life. My goal is to educate the future taxpayers of California about the need to support scientific research for hazards assessment and mitigation, and in a way that is accessible to nonscience majors.

Recent upper division to graduate courses:
My greatest strength in upper division and graduate courses is also my greatest talent in research: field geology. All of my courses are specifically organized to prepare the students for required field trips. The students consistently rave about this approach, and the fact that I love the field so much is infectious. I feel it is particularly important to mentor female students in the field, since this is one of the areas of geology that remains most under-represented at the professional level, where females are more visible in the lab sciences. I also arrange for other professionals to help lead the trips whenever possible, so the students may observe our dialogs.

In winter 2003 I organized a speakers series on the Geology of Baja California that the entire department participated in. I used petroleum industry funds to fly in a different speaker each week (from USGS Menlo Park, Stanford, Northern Arizona University, USC, SDSU, etc) as well as showcasing our own Postdoctoral/Professional Researchers. Then I led a 10-day class field “Trip to the Tip” of Baja California.

In winter 2004 I co-taught a course on the Geology of Mexico with Elena Centeno Garcia, who was here from UNAM (Mexico) on sabbatical. Elena and I raised enough money to pay for plane fares and vehicles for a 10-day joint UCSB-UNAM field through southern Mexico. This trip looped south from Mexico City to the coast at Acapulco, westward to Colima and back through the trans Mexican volcanic belt, providing an overview of the Paleozoic to Recent geology of the region

In fall 2005 I taught Sedimentology and Stratigraphy, and the course culminated in a 6-day off-road 4WD field trip along the Pacific margin of Baja California (see class photo below).
I taught the first half (3 weeks) of the Field Camp in 2005 and 2006 (see photos posted below).

In spring 2006, my Volcanology class took a 10-day field trip through the Cascades arc of California and Oregon. The trip ended at Mount St. Helens in Washington, where the cloud lifted to give us perfect views of the new lava dome, which had just collapsed that day.

Students consulting each other and their TA at the Poleta Folds, summer 2005.

Field Camp 2005: student Abigail Gleason working on Black Point volcano, Mono Lake, CA.

Sedimentology and Stratigrphy class on a 6-day off-road 4WD field trip to Baja California, 2006