Tech Faculty Members on Slate for AGU Offices

by George Zamora

SOCORRO, October 25, 2001 -- Two New Mexico Tech faculty members are on the slate of 64 candidates seeking offices on the governing body of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), an international scientific organization whose membership currently exceeds 35,000.

New Mexico Tech hydrology rofessor John L. Wilson II and geophysics professor Richard C. Aster are both listed on the ballot for the organization's upcoming elections, which start on November 2 and end on December 21.

Wilson is vying for the president-elect position of the Hydrology Section of AGU; while Aster is running for secretary of the Seismology Section of AGU.

Wilson, an AGU member since 1974 and an AGU Fellow since 1994, currently serves as chairman of New Mexico Tech's Earth and environmental science department. His research interests include groundwater hydrology, especially fluid flow and transport in porous, fractured, and faulted media, and geologic characterization. He has been a Tech faculty member since 1984.

Aster, an AGU member since 1987, lists earthquake and volcanic seismology and Earth structure as his major research areas of interest. He has been a geophysics professor at New Mexico Tech since 1991, and is also principal investigator for the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) Program for Array Seismic Studies of the Continental Lithosphere (PASSCAL), an international research center located on the Tech campus.

AGU was established in 1919 by the National Research Council as an organizational framework within which geophysicists from throughout the world can create programs and products needed to advance their interdisciplinary science, which is encompassed by the organization's 11 scientific sections.