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Associate Professor of Geosciences Catherine “Cat” Beck and students, Sara Shedroff ’23 and Marcella Winget ’24, traveled to the Loperot Camp in the Turkana Basin of Kenya’s Rift Valley in June and part of July to conduct research as part of the Turkana Miocene Project funded by the National Science Foundation.

Associate Professor of Geosciences Cat Beck recently co-authored two papers stemming from her work with the Hominin Sites and Paleolakes Drilling Project (HSPDP), which she has been involved in since drilling these cores began in 2013.

The National Science Foundation has awarded Associate Professor of Geosciences Cat Beck, along with University of Dayton geoscientist Zelalem Bedaso, a three-year, $289,094 grant to study seasonal rainfall variability over the last 200,000 years in East Africa.

Earthrates, a National Science Foundation-sponsored Research Coordination Network has funded a workshop proposed by Assistant Professor of Geosciences Catherine Beck titled Drilling Deeper For Connections Between Environmental Change and Evolution to be held on campus in April 2018.

For Mary Langworthy ’17 and Mary Margaret Allen ’17, the geology trip to Turkana, Kenya, was not only a great research experience, but also a true adventure.

Austin Walker ’12 has been awarded a Fulbright Grant to Kenya. He will spend the 2012-13 academic year working on his project “Kenyan Youth Development: Youth as Kenya’s Development Architects” in Nyanza Province of western Kenya. Walker will rejoin the Lwala Community Alliance staff and director Robert Kasabala to build upon the baseline study about youth perspectives on development that they conducted last summer.

“What are you thinking?” That question, voiced or simply pondered, is a common query considered by most of us from time to time. Austin Walker ’12 spent most of his summer posing similar questions to Kenyan youth. Specifically he was focused on uncovering what young people view are the most pressing issues facing them and their country. Walker worked with Professor of Government Steve Orvis with funding from a 2011 Levitt Research Fellowship Grant.