2016 Harriet Evelyn Wallace Scholarship Winners Announced

Alexandria, VA - The American Geosciences Institute (AGI) congratulates Master’s candidate Elaine Young and Ph.D. candidate Andrea Stevens as the 2016 recipients of the Harriet Evelyn Wallace Scholarship. The scholarship, awarded to women pursuing graduate degrees in geoscience, is a $5,000 award for the academic year, with the opportunity to renew for an additional year of support if qualified.

Elaine Young is working towards a master’s degree at the University of California Davis. She is investigating Holocene changes in the rate of plate motion, or slip history, along the San Andreas Fault in the Mojave Desert. She combines fieldwork, measuring landforms offset by the fault, and collecting samples for radiocarbon dating and Monte Carlo modeling to find changes in the slip rate. This has important implications for how scientists think about fault behavior and earthquake predictability, which is directly related to earthquake hazard assessment.

University of Arizona Ph.D. candidate Andrea Stevens is investigating some of the easternmost mountains in the Andean region - the Sierras Pampeanas in Argentina. Their location (literally translated as “mountains in the plains”) poses a puzzle to geologists. These mountains are as far as 500km away from the nearest tectonic plate boundary and there are large swaths of flat plains separating peaks. Stevens is utilizing low temperature thermochronology and sedimentology to constrain the timing and style of deformation and exhumation of the Sierras Pampeanas mountains.

The scholarship is in its fourth year supporting women during their graduate studies. The original bequest was given from Harriet Evelyn Wallace, who was one of the founding members of the Geoscience Information Society (GSIS), a national organization and AGI Member Society that facilitates the exchange of information in the geosciences. The scholarship is awarded to the top 1-2% of applicants who most exemplify strong likelihoods of successful transitions from graduate school into the geoscience workforce.