Join us in congratulating one of our outstanding 2013 Grants-in-Aid recipients, Cat Beck.

Cat is one of 90 Grants-in-Aid award recipients whose field research has taken her on quite an adventure. This past summer she packed her bags and traveled across the world to conduct field research by land cruiser, traversing for two months collecting data across stretches of Kenyan landscape.

Cat’s primary objective is to combine sedimentology, stratigraphy, lateral facies relationships, and ostracod paleoecology to increase the resolution of paleoenvironmental and Holocene lake level reconstructions for the Turkana Basin.

Cat is currently working on her Ph.D. from Rutgers University in New Jersey. Her most recent abstract is titled Paleoenvironmental reconstructions of Holocene lacustrine highstands in a rifts basin, Lake Turkana, Kenya, and will be published in the January 2014 issue of the AAPG Bulletin.

The Grants-in-Aid program affords post-graduate students like Cat an opportunity to help fund their field research. She thanked her donors, David and Beverly Worthington, for sponsoring her grant by sharing sentiments from her journey. She writes:

In Turkana, people usually express their appreciation by slaughtering a goat. While I cannot send you nyama choma (roast meat in Swahili), please accept the attached picture of a mbuzi (goat) as a token of my thanks!
Asante sana (many thanks), Cat Beck