Congratulations to the 89 recipients of the 2013 Grants-in-Aid Award Program. A total of $191,500 was distributed to these worthy graduate students from Australia, Canada, China, Malaysia, Russia, Ukraine, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Recipients came from 45 different schools in 28 U.S. states, and from 15 schools representing seven non-U.S. countries.
Thank you letters are already starting to pour in. One excellent example is this letter from a student at St. Louis University:
“Dear AAPG Foundation Trustees, I would like to express my gratitude to the AAPG Foundation Board of Trustees for accepting me into the Grants-in-Aid program. I was very excited and appreciative when I received notice of the generous $2,250 award from the Classen Family Named Grant.
I am a Ph.D. student at Saint Louis University and am exploring fluid-rock interactions in a fault zone. I will use this award to perform carbonate clumped isotope analysis on drill core samples obtained from the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth (SAFOD). This work combined with results of previous laboratory analyses will help me to determine the source, temperature, and isotopic composition of fluids that once migrated along and through the San Andreas Fault zone. This data will hopefully further our knowledge of processes related to earthquake nucleation, propagation, and arrest.
Thank you again for your support and generosity. I will work hard to complete this project in a timely and effective manner.
Sincerely, Patrick Benjamin Luetkemyer.“
All “Thank you” letters will be posted on the Foundation website. Some of the recipients recently attended ACE and were able to meet with donors – a fantastic experience for all.
Reading these letters makes this whole process personal and meaningful.
Andy Klein, the GIA Committee chair, tallied up some numbers and found that applications were up this year, from 308 to 492, and the acceptance rate was 19 percent.
Applications were received from 55 countries this year, he found, also up from last year’s 38.
To establish a named or memorial grant as part of the GIA program, please contact the AAPG Foundation today. Visit foundation.aapg.org for more information.
Another way to help today’s students is by enabling more universities to have access to AAPG’s Digital Products, such as the Pubs Internet and the GIS-UDRIL University Subscriptions, which allows students at the university of your choice to have access to over a million pages of geological information and maps.
To see which universities already have access, visit foundation.aapg.org.
And finally, many thanks to Todd Stephenson for recently establishing a university subscription for the University of Cincinnati.