Career in Feet-on Seismology

My career award was for imaging the upper mantle beneath North America. The research proposed was timely because of Earthscope and novel because of the proposed simultaneous inversion of different types of seismic data as well as the inclusion of mineral physics data on the effects of volatiles on seismic properties of the mantle. This research has been challenging and fun and is still on-going. The educational component of my career award consists of feet-on and eyes-open learning of seismology through an educational kiosk and field trips to actual seismic stations. The kiosk and field station have both been growing over the years, as has the audience. I started with the field station in-doors, so it doubled as the kiosk along with a palmtop terminal. Groups of minority elementary school children would look at the mysterious hardware of the "field" station and then jump up and down so they could awe at the peaks in the graph on the palmtop screen that they created. This has evolved into a three-screen kiosk, of which one screen is a touch screen along with a demonstration seismometer. The field station is now in a goat shed near the epicenter of an actual 2010 earthquake inIllinois, which is soon to be replaced by a TA station of Earthscope. The audience has grown to entire grades of middle-school children and activities have evolved from jumping to team-experimentation and the derivation of amplitude-distance relationships following a collaborative curriculum. Addressing the questions in the session description: 1) Education is more fun and effective when one can work in a team with an enthusiastic educator. 2) My education activities are strongly related to my field of expertise but very loosely related to the research carried out with the career award. It appears that not the research outcomes are of interest to students, but instead the simplification and accessibility of the process of research that is of interest. 3) The education component of the career award has made me a better and more diversified teacher and I regularly involve graduate student into these education activities.